Chapter XV
ALL-POWERFUL GODS
Again there was a period of intense labor, while the ship driftedthrough time, following Earth in its mad careening about the sun, andthe sun as it rushed headlong through space. At the end of a thirty-dayperiod, they had reached no definite position in their calculations, andthe Talsonian reported, as a medium between the two parties ofscientists, that the work of the Ortolian had not reached a level thatwould make a scientific understanding possible.
As the ship needed no replenishing, they determined to finish theirpresent work before landing, and it was nearly forty thousand yearsafter their first arrival that they again landed on Earth.
It was changed now; the ice caps had retreated visibly, the Nile deltawas far longer, far more prominent, and cities showed on the Earth hereand 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, asmall thing of huts and hovels. But the villagers attacked, swarming upthe hillside furiously, shouting and shrieking warnings of theirterrible 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 bestget 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 weaponsof bronze and wood. The bronze implements of murder were rare, andevidently costly, for those that had them were obviously leaders, andbetter dressed than the others.
"Hang it all, I have only a molecular pistol. Can't use that, it wouldbe a plain massacre!" exclaimed Arcot.
But suddenly several others, who had come up from one side, appearedfrom behind a rock. The scientists were wearing their power suits, andhad them on at low power, leaving a weight of about fifty pounds. Morey,with his normal weight well over two hundred, jumped far to one side ofa clumsy rush of a peasant, leaped back, and caught him from behind.Lifting the smaller man above his head, he hurled him at two othersfollowing. The three went down in a heap.
Most of the men were about five feet tall, and rather lightly built. The"Greek God" had not yet materialized among them. They were probablypoorly fed, and heavily worked. Only the leaders appeared to be in goodphysical condition, and the men could not develop to large stature.Arcot and Morey were giants among them, and with their greater skill,tremendous jumping ability, and far greater strength, easily overcamethe few who had come by the side. One of the leaders was picked up, andtrussed quickly in a rope a fellow had carried.
"Look out," called Wade from above. Suddenly he was standing besidethem, having flown down on the power suit. "Caught your thoughts--ratherZezdon Afthen did." He handed Arcot a ray pistol. The rest of the Greekswere near now, crying in amazement, and running more slowly. They didn'tseem so anxious to attack. Arcot turned the ray pistol to one side.
"Wait!" called Morey. A face peered from around the rock toward whichArcot had aimed his pistol. It was that of a girl, about fifteen yearsold in appearance, but hard work had probably aged her face. Morey bentover, heaved on a small boulder, about two hundred pounds of rock, androlled it free of the depression it rested in, then caught it on amolecular ray, hurled it up. Arcot turned his heat ray on it for aninstant, and it was white hot. Then the molecular ray threw it overtoward the great rock, and crushed it against it. Three childrenshrieked and ran out from the rock, scurrying down the hillside.
The soldiers had stopped. They looked at Morey. Then they looked at thegreat rock, three hundred yards from him. They looked at the rockfragments.
"They think you threw it," grinned Arcot.
"What else--they saw me pick it up, saw me roll it, and it flew. Whatelse could they think?"
Arcot's heat ray hissed out, and the rocks sputtered and cracked, thenglowed white. There was a dull explosion, and chips of rock flew up.Water, imprisoned, had been turned into steam. In a moment the whistleand crackle of combined heat and molecular rays stabbing out fromArcot's hands had built a barrier of fused rocks.
Leisurely Arcot and Morey carried their now revived prisoner back to theship, while Wade flew ahead to open the locks.
Half an hour later the prisoner was discharged, much to his surprise,and the ship rose. They had been able to learn nothing from him. Eventhe Greek Gods, Zeus, Hermes, Apollo, all the later Greek gods, wereunknown, or so greatly changed that Arcot could not recognize them.
"Well," he said at length, "it seems all we know is that they camebefore any historical Greeks we know of. That puts them back quite abit, but I don't know how far. Shall we go see the Egyptians?"
They tried Egypt, a few moments across the Mediterranean, landing closeto the mouth of the Nile. The people of a village near by immediatelyset out after them. Better prepared this time, Arcot flew out to meetthem with Zezdon Afthen and Stel Felso Theu. Surely, he felt, the sightof the strange men would be no more terrifying than the ship or the menflying. And that did not seem to deter their attack. Apparently theproverb that "Discretion is the better part of valor," had not beeninvented.
Arcot landed near the head of the column, and cut off two or three menfrom the rest with the aid of his ray pistol. Zezdon Afthen quicklysearched his mind, and with Arcot's aid they determined he did not knowany of the Gods that Arcot suggested.
Finally they had to return to the ship, disappointed. They had had theslight satisfaction of finding that the Sun God was Ralz, the laterEgyptian Ra might well have been an evolved form of that name.
They restocked the ship, fresh game and fruits again appearing on themenu, then once again they launched forth into space to wait for theirown time.
"It seems to me that we must have produced some effect by our visit,"said Arcot, shaking his head solemnly.
"We did, Arcot," replied Morey softly. "We left an impress in history,an impress that still is, and an impress that affected countlessthousands.
"Meet the Egyptian Gods with their heads strange to terrestrians, theGods who fly through the air without wings, come from a shining housethat flies, whose look, whose pointed finger melts the desert sands, andthe moist soil!" he continued softly, nodding toward the Ortolian andthe Talsonian.
"Their 'impossible' Gods existed, and visited them. Indubitably somegenius saw that here was a chance for fame and fortune and sold 'charms'against the 'Gods.' Result: we are carrying with us some of the oldestdeities. Again, we did leave our imprint in history."
"And," cried Wade excitedly, "meet the great Hercules, who threw menabout. I always knew that Morey was a brainless brute, but I neverrealized the marvelous divining powers of those Greeks soperfectly--now, the Incarnation of Dumb Power!" Dramatically Wadepointed to Morey, unable even now to refrain from some unnecessarycomments.
"All right, Mercury, the messenger of the Gods speaks. The little flapson Wade's flying shoes must indeed have looked like the winged shoes oflegend. Wade was Mercury, too brainless for anything but carrying thewords of wisdom uttered by others.
"And Arcot," continued Morey, releasing Wade from his condescendingstare, "is Jove, hurling the rockfusing, destroying thunderbolts!"
"The Gods that my friends have been talking of," explained Arcot to thecurious Ortolians, "are legendary deities of Earth. I can see now thatwe did leave an imprint on history in the only way we could--as Gods,for surely no other explanation could have occurred to those men."
The days passed swiftly in the ship, as their work approachedcompletion. Finally, when the last of the equation of Time, artificialmatter, and the most awful of their weapons, the unlimited Cosmic Power,had been calculated, they fell to the last stage of the work. The actualappliances were designed. Then the completed apparatus that the Ortolianand the Talsonian had been working on, was carefully investigated by theterrestrial physicists, and its mechanis
m studied. Arcot had great plansfor this, and now it was incorporated in their control apparatus.
The one remaining problem was their exact location in time. Alreadytheir progress had brought them well up to the nineteenth century, but,as Morey sadly remarked, they couldn't tell what date, for they weresadly lacking in history. Had they known the real date, for instance, ofthe famous battle of Bull Run, they could have watched it in thetelectroscope, and so determined their time. As it was, they knew onlythat it was one of the periods of the first half of the decade of 1860.
"As historians, we're a bunch of first-class kitchen mechanics. Lookslike we're due for another landing to locate the exact date," agreedArcot.
"Why land now? Let's wait until we are nearer the time to which webelong, so we won't have to watch so carefully and so long," suggestedWade.
They argued this question for about two hundred years as a matter offact. After that, it was academic anyway.