Turning the knife over and over, One-Eye slobbered in delirious glee. He jabbered excitedly at Yancey, clawed at the man’s shoulder with caressing paw. Then he leaped from his place by the campfire and slithered away into the darkness. Not so much as a breaking twig heralded his plunge into the night.
Yancey rubbed his eyes.
“I wonder what the damn old fool is up to now?” he asked.
“Went off to try his new knife,” suggested Cabot. “Something like that calls for a little throat-slitting.”
Yancey listened to the moaning of a saber-tooth in the brush only a short distance away, heard the bellow of a mammoth down by the river.
He shook his head dolefully.
“I sure hope he watches his step,” he said. “He’s slowing up. Getting old. That saber-tooth out there might get him.”
But in fifteen minutes One-Eye was back again. He waddled into the circle of firelight so silently that the men did not hear his approach.
Looking over his shoulder, Yancey saw him standing back of him. One-Eye was holding out a clenched fist, but within the fist was something that glinted in the flare of the campfire.
Pascal caught his breath.
“He’s brought you something,” he told Yancey. “Something in exchange for the knife. I would never have believed it. The barter principle.”
Yancey rose and held out his hand. One-Eye dropped the shiny thing into it. Living flame lanced from it, striking Yancey’s eyeballs.
It was a stone. Yancey rotated it slowly with his fingers and saw that within its center dwelt a heart of icy blue flame, while from its many facets swarmed arcing colors of breath-taking beauty.
Cabot was at his elbow, staring.
“What is it, Yancey?” he gasped.
Yancey almost sobbed.
“It’s a diamond,” he said. “A diamond as big as my fist!”
“But it’s cut,” protested Cabot. “That’s not a stone out of the rough. A master jeweler cut that stone!”
Yancey nodded.
“Just what would a cut diamond be doing in the old Stone Age?” he asked.
CHAPTER IV
The Broadcast in Time
One-Eye pointed down into the throat of a cave and jabbered violently at Yancey. The hunter patted the hoary shoulders and One-Eye danced with glee.
“This must be it,” Yancey said.
“I hope so,” said Cameron. “It’s taken plenty of time to make him understand what we wanted. I still can’t understand how we did it.”
Cabot wagged his head.
“I can’t understand any of it,” he confessed. “A Neanderthaler lugging around cut diamonds. Diamonds as big as a man’s fist.”
“Well, let’s go down and see for ourselves,” suggested Yancey.
One-Eye led the way down the steep, slippery mouth of the cave and into a dimly lit cavern, filled with a sort of half-light that filtered in from the mouth of the cave on the ground above.
Cabot switched on a flashlight and cried out excitedly.
In cascading piles upon the floor of the cavern, stacked high against its rocky sides, were piles of jewels that flashed and glittered, scintillating in the beams of the torch.
“This is it!” yelled Cameron.
Pascal, down on his knees in front of a pile of jewels, dipped his hands into them, lifted a fistful and let them trickle back. They filled the cavern with little murmurings as they fell.
Cabot swept the cave with the light. They saw piles of jewels; neat stacks of gold ingots, apparently freshly smelted; bars of silver-white iridium; of argent platinum; chests of hammered bronze and copper; buckskin bags spilling native golden nuggets.
Yancey reached out a hand and leaned weakly against the wall.
“My God,” he stammered. “The price of empires!”
“But,” said Pascal, slowly, calmly, although his face, as Cabot’s torch suddenly lighted it, was twisted in an agony of disbelief, “how did this all come here? This is a primitive world. The art of the goldsmith and the jewel-cutter is unknown here.”
Cameron’s voice cut coolly out of the darkness.
“There must be an explanation. Some reason. Some previous civilization. A treasure cache of that civilization.”
“No,” Pascal told him, “not that. Look at those gold bars. New. Freshly smelted. No sign of age. And platinum—that’s a comparatively recent discovery. Iridium even more recent.”
Cabot’s voice held an edge of steel command.
“We can argue about how it got here after we have it stowed away,” he said. “Pascal, you and Hugh go down and bring up the tractor. Yancey and I will start carrying this stuff up to the surface right away.”
Yancey toiled up the throat of the cave. Reaching the surface he slid the sack of jewels from his shoulder and wiped his brow.
“Tough work,” he told Cameron.
Cameron nodded.
“But it’s almost over now,” he comforted. “Just a few more hours and we’ll have the last of the stuff in the tractor. Then we can get out of here.”
Yancey nodded.
“I don’t feel too safe,” he admitted. “Somebody hid all this junk in the cave. How they did it, I don’t have the faintest idea. But I have a queer feeling it wouldn’t go easy with us if they caught us.”
Pascal stagger out of the cave and slid a gold bar from his shoulder.
He mopped his brow with a shirt sleeve.
“I’m going down to the tractor and get a drink of water before I pack that a foot farther,” he announced.
Yancey stooped to pick up his gunny sack. Pascal’s scream echoed.
The hillside below the tractor before had been empty of everything except a few scattered boulders and trees. Now a machine rested there, a grotesque machine of black metal, streamlined, with stubby wings, suggestive of a plane. As Yancey caught his first sight of it, it was indistinct, blurred, as if he saw it through a shimmering haze. Then it became clear, sharp-cut.
Like a slap in the face came the knowledge that here was the answer to those vague fears he had felt. Here must be the owners of the treasure cache.
His hand slapped down to his thigh and his gun whispered out of its holster.
A door in the strange machine snapped open and out of it stepped a man—but hardly a man. The creature sported a long tail, and it was covered with scales. Twin horns, three inches or so in height, sprouted from its forehead.
The newcomer carried something that looked like a gun in his hand, but no gun such as Yancey had ever seen. He saw the weapon tilt up toward him and his .45 exploded in his fist. Even as flame blossomed from his gun, he saw a .45 come up in Cameron’s hand, in the second after the blast of his own gun, then heard the deadly click of a cocking hammer.
The first of the scaly men was down. But others were tumbling out of the strange mechanism.
Cameron’s gun barked and once again Yancey felt the comforting kick of the .45 against the heel of his palm, hardly knowing he had squeezed the trigger.
From one of the guns carried by the scaly men whipped out a pencil of purple flame. Yancey felt its hot breath clip past his cheek.
Before the time-tractor lay Pascal, stretched out, inert, like an empty sack. Over him stood Cabot, gun flaming. Another one of those purple flames reached out, hit a boulder beside Yancey. The boulder glowed with sudden heat, started to chip and crack.