The needle passed its limit, and still they droned on through a featureless grayness. Saunders reset the dial and noted the first half millennium. It was nice, though not necessary, to know what year it was when they emerged.
He wasn’t worried at first. Man’s works were so horribly impermanent; he thought with a sadness of the cities and civilizations he had seen rise and spend their little hour and sink back into the night and chaos of time. But after a thousand years…
Two thousand…
Three thousand…
Belgotai’s face was white and tense in the dull glow of the instrument panel. «How long to go?» he whispered.
«I—don’t—know.»
Within the machine, the long minutes passed while the projector hummed its song of power and two men stared with hypnotized fascination at the creeping record of centuries.
For twenty thousand years that incredible thing stood. In the year 25,296 A.D., the switch suddenly went down under Saunders’ steady tug. The machine flashed into reality, tilted, and slid down a few feet before coming to rest. Wildly, they opened the door.
The projector lay on a stone block big as a small house, whose ultimate slipping from its place had freed them. It was halfway up a pyramid.
A monument of gray stone, a tetrahedron a mile to a side and a half a mile high. The outer casing had worn away, or been removed, so that the tremendous blocks stood naked to the weather. Soil had drifted up onto it, grass and trees grew on its titanic slopes. Their roots, and wind and rain and frost, were slowly crumbling the artificial hill to earth again, but still it dominated the landscape.
A defaced carving leered out from a tangle of brush. Saunders looked at it and looked away, shuddering. No human being had ever carved that thing.
The countryside around was altered; he couldn’t see the old river and there was a lake glimmering in the distance which had not been there before. The hills seemed lower, and forest covered them. It was a wild, primeval scene, but there was a spaceship standing near the base, a monster machine with its nose rearing skyward and a sunburst blazon on its hull. And there were men working nearby.
Saunders’ shout rang in the still air. He and Belgotai scrambled down the steep slopes of earth, clawing past trees and vines. Men!
No—not all men. A dozen great shining engines were toiling without supervision at the foot of the pyramid—robots. And of the group which turned to stare at the travelers, two were squat, blue-furred, with snouted faces and six-fingered hands.
Saunders realized with an unexpectedly eerie shock that he was seeing extraterrestrial intelligence. But it was to the men that he faced.
They were all tall, with aristocratically refined features and a calm that seemed inbred. Their clothing was impossible to describe, it was like a rainbow shimmer around them, never the same in its play of color and shape. So, thought Saunders, so must the old gods have looked on high Olympus, beings greater and more beautiful than man.
But it was a human voice that called to them, a deep, well-modulated tone in a totally foreign language. Saunders remembered exasperatedly that he had forgotten the psychophone. But one of the blue-furred aliens was already fetching a round, knob-studded globe out of which the familiar translating voice seemed to come: «…time travelers.»
«From the very remote past, obviously,» said another man. Damn him, damn them all, they weren’t any more excited than at the bird which rose, startled, from the long grass. You’d think time travelers would at least be worth shaking by the hand.
«Listen,» snapped Saunders, realizing in the back of his mind that his annoyance was a reaction against the awesomeness of the company, «we’re in trouble. Our machine won’t carry us back, and we have to find a period of time which knows how to reverse the effect. Can you do it?»
One of the aliens shook his animal head. «No,» he said. «There is no way known to physics of getting farther back than about seventy years. Beyond that, the required energy approaches infinity and—»
Saunders groaned. «We know it,» said Belgotai harshly.
«At least you must rest,» said one of the men in a more kindly tone. «It will be interesting to hear your story.»
«I’ve told it to too many people in the last few millennia,» rasped Saunders. «Let’s hear yours for a change.»
Two of the strangers exchanged low-voiced words. Saunders could almost translate them himself: «Barbarians—childish emotional pattern—well, humor them for a while.»
«This is an archaeological expedition, excavating the pyramid,» said one of the men patiently. «We are from the Galactic Institute, Sarlan-sector branch. I am Lord Arsfel of Astracyr, and these are my subordinates. The nonhumans, as you may wish to know, are from the planet Quulhan, whose sun is not visible from Terra.»
Despite himself, Saunders’ awed gaze turned to the stupendous mass looming over them. «Who built it?» he breathed.
«The Ixchulhi made such structures on planets they conquered, no one knows why. But then, no one knows what they were, or where they came from, or where they ultimately went. It is hoped that some of the answers may be found in their pyramids.»
The atmosphere grew more relaxed. Deftly, the men of the expedition got Saunders’ and Belgotai’s stories and what information about their almost prehistoric periods they cared for. In exchange, something of history was offered them.
After the Ixchulhi’s ruinous wars the Galaxy had made a surprisingly rapid comeback. New techniques of mathematical psychology made it possible to unite the peoples of a billion worlds and rule them effectively. The Galactic Empire was egalitarian—it had to be, for one of its mainstays was the fantastically old and evolved race of the planet called Vro-Hi by men.
It was peaceful, prosperous, colorful with diversity of races and cultures, expanding in science and the arts. It had already endured for ten thousand years, and there seemed no doubt in Arsfel’s calm mind that it could endure forever. The barbarians along the Galactic periphery and out in the Magellanic Clouds? Nonsense! The Empire would get around to civilizing them in due course; meanwhile they were only a nuisance.
But Sol could almost be called one of the barbarian suns, though it lay within the Imperial boundaries. Civilization was concentrated near the center of the Galaxy, and Sol lay up in what was actually a remote and thinly starred region of space. A few primitive landsmen still lived on its planets and had infrequent intercourse with the nearer stars, but they hardly counted. The human race had almost forgotten its ancient home.
Somehow the picture was saddening to the American. He thought of old Earth spinning on her lonely way through the emptiness of space, he thought of the great arrogant Empire and of all the mighty dominions which had fallen to dust through the millennia. But when he ventured to suggest that this civilization, too, was not immortal, he was immediately snowed under with figures, facts, logic, the curious paramathematical symbolism of modern mass psychology. It could be shown rigorously that the present setup was inherently stable—and already ten thousand years of history had given no evidence to upset that science…
«I give up,» said Saunders. «I can’t argue with you.»
They were shown through the spaceship’s immense interior, the luxurious apartments of the expedition, the looming intricate machinery which did its own thinking. Arsfel tried to show them his art, his recorded music, his psycho-books, but it was no use, they didn’t have the understanding.
Savages! Could an Australian aborigine have appreciated Rembrandt, Beethoven, Kant, or Einstein? Could he have lived happily in sophisticated New York society?