"Kukulcan— or whoever the alien was— must have shown them how to do it. That's immaterial, anyway."
"Immaterial? I suppose it's immaterial that your so-called alien happened to be using numbers invented on earth. Or that these time travelers from outer space mark their calendars from the birth of Jesus the Earthman."
"Oh," Lizzie said, her confidence fading visibly. "But it made such sense...."
"Stick to your pots," Remo said. He walked over to the line of heavy hanging draperies and yanked them down.
"What are you doing?" Lizzie shrieked. "Those are... Oh, my God."
They both stared in silence. For behind the draperies, beneath the panels of buttons and knobs and darkened lights, were four words they both read, again and again and again:
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
?Chapter Ten
Captain's Log
8/21/2032
Our journey has begun— and perhaps ended— in calamity.
"Look at this," Lizzie said, drawing out a large book encased in plastic from a metal compartment. The beginning pages of the diary were filled with numbers and equations. The rest— hundreds of entries— were written in a hand that began with neat, controlled strokes and ended with a shaking, nearly illegible scrawl.
If we return, this document will serve as a record of our time here. If not, I will bury it upon its completion in the hope that some future generation might benefit from the experiences of myself and my crew on board the U.S. Cassandra.
Lizzie flipped through the log. The last hundred pages or so were blank. The author had either died before the diary was completed, or returned suddenly to his own time without it.
In case of the latter possibility— more a probability now— I will put down briefly the facts of this mission, omitting all matter confidential to national security.
Our assignment was to test the time traveling device on board the craft. To do so without disturbing the course of history, we were to venture to a period long before the advent of human civilization, to 100,000 B. C. or further.
Although I cannot disclose the exact location of the experiment, it was to be in the southernmost region of the South American continent to eliminate any possibility of disrupting any form of human habitation which might have occurred at that time. We were to retrieve plant and animal specimens, and record our stay through constantly operating television cameras. We traveled with full space apparatus in tow, including protective clothing and oxygen equipment, as the atmospheric content at that time during the earth's evolution is uncertain.
The time module inside the fuselage of the Cassandra operates on a principle of vibrating molecules triggered by shock-sensitive equipment. The system, I must submit, has no backup to prevent the mechanism from malfunctioning in the event of sudden movement, such as an emergency crash landing. To install such a secondary system would have required several more months of refinement, and everyone on earth knows that the Russians have for the past two years...
The rest of the line was scratched out. The log took up again on the next line, the handwriting more stable.
That is inconsequential now. The worst has happened, and there is no call for complaint. All six of us volunteered for this mission, and all of us knew there were risks involved in accepting it.
More than a week ago, on 8/11/32, as we were passing over the area of the Central American Republic, one of the turbines blew. My engineer, Metters, is still working to determine and correct the problem. The malfunction resulted in a severe loss of balance for the Cassandra, as she is made of Reardon metal, and lighter than aluminum. Although the Air Force has been utilizing craft constructed from Reardon for the past several years, no Reardon plane carrying the weight of our expedition has been used outside of tests.
"The plane's made of something called Reardon metal," Lizzie said. "It's lighter than aluminum."
"And never rusts," Remo mused.
"It doesn't say, but I guess we can assume that."
We fell into a nosedive from which I could not pull out. When I felt certain that we would crash, I ordered the crew into the padded time module and set the computer to automatic, leaving it to either correct the malfunction or to land safely. Pilots, they say, are no longer necessary to aircraft except to oversee the running of electronic machinery.
The computer was no better a pilot than I was. Cassandra crashed. Somehow, probably due to the resilience of the Reardon metal, the time module remained intact, although the craft was badly damaged and the video cameras utterly destroyed.
The worst of it was that the time-traveling component, activated just after takeoff, was irreversible. Once the functioning of Cassandra is placed onto computer-operated automatic pilot, all systems lock. When we emerged from the time module, we found that we had landed in the year the time system had reached at the moment of the crash— 3114 B. C.
We landed in the middle of a settlement of some kind, destroying several dwellings and killing at least twelve civilians. I recognize that I face court-martial for this offense, and accept any punishment the government of the United States chooses to impose on me.
The ruling body here, in this small city-state, has greeted us unexpectedly. Instead of hanging us, as they had every right to do, they have showered us with gifts and adoration, burying their dead without blame. They believe, I am certain, that we are deities from some far-off place.
The mission is already an unqualified disaster. Our cardinal rule— not to disturb the history of mankind— has been broken, due to unforseeable circumstances. Although my crew is taking pains to avoid contact with the people of this distant time, sleeping in our mylar tents in the immediate vicinity of the craft, eating from our rations, I cannot say how great an effect our arrival may cause here.
The most important decision is one I have put off making. Every day we see, from our limited vantage point, the struggle of these ancient people with common problems— sanitation, disease, building, irrigation— which even a child coming from our civilization could solve. It is difficult to watch the farmers plant their seeds on hillside slopes, knowing that their crops will be washed away with the rain. It is harder still to see mothers carrying babies covered with leeches in an attempt to cure malaria, when Chinchona bark— a known cure for the disease— is readily available in the local forest.
I do not know how long I can stand by, responsible as I am for the deaths of many of these people, without aiding them in some small way.
The crew is spending the whole of every day working on Cassandra, attempting either to repair the time travel mechanism, or to get the craft into suitable condition to fly to a less inhabited location, where we could work on repairs without the constant fear of encroaching on this village. I do not know if either is possible.
The entry was signed "Colonel Kurt Cooligan, U.S. Air Force."
"Guess there's not much doubt where 'Kukulcan' came from," Remo said.
Lizzie leafed through the pages absently. "Kurt Cooligan, the white god from the sky," she whispered. "Poor guy."
"From what we've seen here, it looks like he made his decision," Remo said. "Did he ever fix the time module?"
"I don't know yet," she said, skimming the pages rapidly. "Here's something about 'waves'... No, it's 'war.' His handwriting gets worse as he goes along."
"Must have been pretty hard on him."
"There's a lot about war. Some kind of war he got involved in here."
"The king told us that. Cooligan drove off some other tribe or something. Probably used guns— wait a second."
"The magic spears of fire," Lizzie remembered.