'But here were civilised people, though mightily uncivilised from our point of view. Out of the two hundred we got, fifty were so hysterical with fear that we quickly put them back where we'd found them. Most of those left were from the Mediterranean lands or from a land through which ran a great river called Sindhu, or they were from the far east. The latter were brown people with epicanthic folds. A few were from a city in the middle of a continent across an ocean west of the largest continent. Or east.'
Here Hfathon interrupted his lecture to ask the four if they had names for these.
'The land of the Sindhu river would be India,' Orme said. 'The far east people would be Chinese or other Mongolians. The land that connects the two continents would be Central America and the people from there would, I suppose, be Mayans. By the great continent I think you mean three continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia.'
'We thought it was one continent,' Hfathon said. 'It looks like one land mass from the photos I've seen.'
'They may be connected, but they're three separate continents,' Orme said. 'Though, actually, Europe isn't. It's considered to be a separate land mass because of historic and racial reasons. But that big land mass to the west of Eurasia is also two continents, North and South America. The narrow portion where you got the Mayans or whatever they were is Central America. It connects the two.'
'I don't want to get into geographical disputes,' Hfathon said. 'Most of those we brought back to the mother ship were sick with disease. We cured them and then learned their languages before we gave them the choice of going back or staying with the ship.
'One of the persons was from the continent you call Africa, in an area not too far from Khem, or Aegyptos in Greek; he was a Hebrew named Mattathias or Matthias for short. He was the disciple of the Messiah, the one chosen by lot to succeed Yehudhah. In Greek, loudas Iskariotes, the apostle who betrayed the Messiah.'
'You're talking about Matthias and Judas-Iscariot!' Orme said in English, incredulous.
The Krsh ignored his outburst. He pressed a small device in his hand, and inside the huge set on the wall appeared a small bearded man talking to two Krsh in a small room.
'What language is he speaking?' Orme whispered to Bronski.
'I think it's Aramaic.'
'That is Matthias,' Hfathon said.
He paused. 'He was the thirteenth apostle, and he knew Jesus well before he was crucified. He walked and talked and ate with him here.'
Orme wanted to ask him to explain just what he meant by his last remark - 'ate with him here' - but Hfathon was talking about the sudden appearance of the Sons of Darkness.
'Our detectors picked them up as they came from behind the planet you call Jupiter. We had three choices, hide, fight, or run. We could have concealed the ship beneath the surface 'of an ocean, or we could have escaped from the system readily, since we could outrun them. But we did not know what they would do to Earth. From what we'd seen, they were ruthless and savage. They had a high degree of technological civilisation, but that does not mean an equally high ethical standard.
'What if they would destroy Earth as they had the fourth planet in their system? Or perhaps they might enslave the Earthmen. Since we were the ones responsible for their being here, we had a duty to protect Earth. Our policy was to interfere as little as possible in the development of another species, though it might hurt us not to rectify the evil things done there.'
He paused again.
'At least, that was our policy then.'
Orme sat up straight. What did that enigmatic statement mean?
'So we decided to fight.'
Orme said, 'Pardon me, Hfathon, but I just can't restrain myself. You said, "Our policy then." What...?'
'That will be explained later.'
'Okay. But what I also want to know is how you could identify the ships of the "Sons of Darkness", as you call them. Was it their configuration or what?'
'They were shaped like those which had attacked us before. We didn't know, rather, our ancestors, the crew, didn't know how they had managed to follow us. A spaceship doesn't leave spoor. At least, we didn't think so, though perhaps those Sons of Darkness were more advanced than we thought.
'Also, they had to have had Starships when we visited their system, though we hadn't observed any. Anyway...'
The Krsh ship, with the Terrestrial 'guests' still aboard, met the enemy 100,000 miles beyond Mars. The battle was brief and furious. Pieces of the attackers floated towards the sun. But the Krsh had been hard hit. With only one engine operating, it made for Mars and crash-landed. Fortunately, the impact was not serious to the crew and passengers. But the vessel could not be repaired, and the smaller survey ship was ruined.
The Marsnauts watched pictures taken of the flight and the wrecking, and of the measures taken for survival. With the equipment at hand, the Krsh hollowed out of the hard rock a temporary base. From the minerals they made oxygen and food. And as the years went by, they expanded, eventually ending up with the great underground complex.
Orme found this account interesting, but he was more eager to get back to the story of Matthias. He felt awed. The apostle had actually been with these people. And, as Hfathon's holograms showed, he was buried in the rock here within a short drive. The camera had swooped over the cemetery, showing first the gravestones of the early inhabitants. They were inscribed with letters in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Krsh, ideograms in Chinese, and several in what he supposed were Mayan hieroglyphs.
As the camera moved towards the later graves, all the lettering became Hebrew. The stones were of the same size since the law required that. According to the Hebrews, all persons were equal in death, holy and sinful, rich and poor, young and old, men, women, and children.
Bronski translated the inscription.
'Mattathias bar-Hamath. The years in the Hebrew chronology correspond to 2 AD and 149 AD respectively.'
Near the apostle's stone were ten others which Hfathon pointed out.
'These were Matthias's companions, his disciples rather, who were stricken with a disease when we picked them up. They were Libyan Jews whom he had convinced that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. It was Matthias who, with his ten, converted all his pagan human companions. But we Krsh were not yet shown the light. Most of us were agnostics or atheists, though there were some who clung to the religions of their ancestors. We did not interfere when he brought all our humans under the law of Moses, even though, in our ignorance, we could see nothing but senseless brutality in some of their laws.'
Orme could contain himself no longer. Rising to his feet, he shouted, 'And what made you change your hearts?'
'The Messiah himself appeared to us. And he did that which convinced us forever.'
9
Philemon Zhbeshg Mosheh ben-Yonathan was a young man of thirty-five. He was a bit of a dandy with his violet-dyed sidelocks, his large silver cart-wheel earrings, and his rainbow-striped robe. His elderly relatives thought his apparel scandalous. His ornamented buskins and scarlet toenails caused them to reproach him openly. He listened meekly and silently, but when he had heard them out he went on dressed as before. Like so many young people, twenty-two to fifty, he dressed as he pleased, to be fashionable.
Unlike his contemporaries, however, he was not given to excessive drinking, that is, drinking more than three glasses of wine in a day. Because he was an athlete, he permitted himself only one glass of wine during supper.