The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

for a purpose and have been there for a long time. Whether they were originally in the water, or the land sank, that we don’t know either. But now we have a site to set up the peep-probe.”
    “We do that right away?” Ross wanted to know. Impatience bit at him. But Ashe still had a trace of frown. He shook his head.
    “Have to make sure of our site, very sure. I don’t want to start any chain reaction on the other side of the time wall.”
    And he was right, Ross was forced to admit, remembering what had happened when the galactics had discovered the Red time gates and traced them forward to their twentieth-century source, ruthlessly destroying each station. The original colonists of Hawaika had been as giants to Terran pygmies when it came to technical knowledge. To use even a peep-probe indiscreetly near one of their outposts might bring swift and terrible retribution.
    CHAPTER 3
    The Ancient Mariners
    Another map spreadout and this time pinned down with small stones on beach gravel.
    “Here, here, and here—” Ashe’s finger indicated the points marked in a pattern which flared out from three sides of Finger Island. Each marked a set of three undersea depressions in perfect alliance with the land which, according to the galactic map, had once been a cape on a much larger land mass. Though the Terrans had found the ruins, if those saucers in the sea could be so termed, the remains had no meaning for the explorers.
    “Do we set up here?” Ross asked. “If we could just get a report to send back.…” That might mean the difference between awakening the co-operation of the Project policy makers so that a flood of supplies and personnel would begin to head their way.
    “We set up here,” Ashe decided.
    He had selected a point between two of the lines where a reef would provide them with a secure base. And once that decision was made, the Terrans went into action.
    Two days to go, to install the peep-probe and take some shots before the ship had to clear with or without their evidence. Together Ross and Ashe floated the installation out to the reef, Ui and Karara helping to tow the equipment and parts, the dolphins lending pushing noses on occasion. The aquatic mammals were as interested as the human beings they aided. And in water their help was invaluable. Had dolphins developed hands, Ross wondered fleetingly, would they have long ago wrested control of their native world—or at least of its seas—from the human kind?
    All the human beings worked with practiced ease, even while masked and submerged, to set the probe in place, aiming it landward at the check point of the Finger’s protruding nail of rock. After Ashe made the final adjustments, tested each and every part of the assembly, he gestured them in.
    Karara’s swift hand movement asked a question, and Ashe’s sonic code-clicked in reply: “At twilight.”
    Yes, dusk was the proper time for using a peep-probe. To see without risk of being sighted in return was their safeguard. Here Ashe had no historical data to guide him. Their search for the former inhabitants might be a long drawn-out process skipping across centuries as the machine was adjusted to Terran time eras.
    “When were they here?” Back on shore Karara shook out her hair, spread it over her shoulders to dry. “How many hundred years back will the probe return?”
    “More likely thousands,” Ross commented. “Where will you start, Gordon?”
    Ashe brushed sand from the page of the notebook he had steadied against one bent knee and gazed out at the reef where they had set the probe.
    “Ten thousand years—”
    “Why?” Karara wanted to know. “Why that exact figure?”
    “We know that galactic ships crashed on Terra then. So their commerce and empire—if it was an empire—was far-flung at that time. Perhaps they were at the zenith of their civilization; perhaps they were already on the down slope. I do not think they were near the beginning. So that date is as good a starting place as any. If we don’t hit what we’re after, then we can move forward until we do.”
    “Do you think that there ever was a native population here?”
    “Might have been.”
    “But without any large land animals, no modern traces of any,” she protested.
    “Of people?” Ashe shrugged. “Good answers for both. Suppose there was a world-wide epidemic of proportions to wipe out a species. Or a war in which they used forces beyond our comprehension to alter the whole face of this