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.