was hunkered low against the ground so that his silhouette would have been broken by the branches of the thicket and, besides, it was summertime and the shrubs had leaves. But in a very short time, even before the ship had been completely unloaded, one of the robots working at the unloading left the hilltop and came down the hillside, walking straight toward where my grandfather was hiding in the thicket. He thought at first that it was only a coincidence that the robot should be walking toward him and he stayed very still, even breathing as shallowly as he could.
It was not coincidence, however. The robot must have known exactly where he was. My grandfather always thought that one of the sentinels had somehow spotted him, perhaps by a thermal reading, and, staying on post itself, had passed the information that there was a watcher.
Arriving at the thicket, the robot reached down, grabbed my grandfather by the arm and jerked him out of there, then marched him up the hill.
My grandfather admitted to me that from this point onward his memory was not consecutive. While the time element of what he did remember seemed to be consecutive, not jumbled chronologically, there were gaps for which he could not account. He was convinced that before he was let go or managed to escape (although both of these, too, are conjectured, for at no time, so far as he could recall, did he have the feeling that he was being held captive) an attempt was made to erase the memories of what had happened from his mind. He believed that for a time the memory erasure was effective; it was only after he arrived on Alden that he began, in bits and pieces, to remember what had happened-as if the events had been submerged, pushed deep into his brain, and came pushing back again only after a number of years.
He did remember talking with the man that seemed to him not to be entirely a man, and the impression that he carried with him was that this creature was soft-voiced and not at all unkind, although he could not remember a single thing that was said between them, with one exception. The man (if it were a man) told him, he recalled, that he had come from Greece (there was at that time no country that was known as Greece, but at one time there had been) where he had lived for long-my grandfather remembered clearly that phrase, 'for long,' and thought it rather strange that it should be expressed that way. The man also told my grandfather that he had sought out a place where life would not be threatened and thought, from certain measurements or from certain other facts my grandfather did not comprehend, that he had found it there in that place he had landed.
My grandfather also recalled that some of the equipment that had been taken from the ship was employed by the robots to drive a deep shaft into the solid rock which lay beneath the hill and, once the shaft was driven, to hollow out great chambers underground. And once this had been done a small hut, rude on the outside, constructed of timbers and made to look as if it were old and about to tumble down, but its interior well finished to make for comfortable living, was built above the tunnel, which had steps going down to the rock-hewn chambers and a clever trapdoor fixed at the mouth of the tunnel so that, once closed, no one would suspect that it was there.
The boxes which had been unloaded from the ship were carried down into the chambers, except for a few that held furniture and furnishings for the hut atop the tunnel.
When one of the boxes was being carried down the steps into the chambers it slipped out of a robot's grasp and my grandfather, who, for some reason he does not recall, was in the chamber below, saw it come tumbling down the stairs and hurriedly got out of its way. It was a heavy box, but even so, as it tumbled down the stairs, it began to come apart, to be battered apart by striking on the stones, and by the time it reached the bottom of the steps it had come apart entirely so that all that it contained was either scattered on the steps or spilled out on the chamber's floor.
There was a great treasure in that box, my grandfather told me-jewel-encrusted pendants and bracelets and rings, all set with shining stones; small wheels of gold with strange markings on them (my grandfather insisted they were gold, although how he could tell a thing was gold by simply looking at it, I do not understand); figurines of animals and birds made of precious metals and set with precious stones; a half a dozen crowns (the kind kings or queens would wear); bags that split open to loose a flood of coins, and many other things, including some vases, all of which were smashed.
The robots came rushing down the stairs to pick up all the treasure that was scattered and behind them came their master and when he reached the bottom of the stairs he paid no attention to all the other things, but stooped and picked up some of the pieces of a shattered vase and tried to fit them back together, but he could not fit them back together, for they had been broken into too many pieces. But from the few pieces that he did fit together, trying to hold all those broken pieces in their proper places, my grandfather saw that the vase had had painted pictures on it, fired into the glaze-pictures of strange men hunting even stranger beasts, or maybe they only seemed stranger because they were so badly done, with no thought of perspective and without the anatomical knowledge that is basic with an artist.
The man (if it were a man) stood there with the broken pieces in his hands and his head was bent above them and his face was sad and a tear rolled down his cheek. My grandfather thought it strange that a man should weep at the sight of a broken vase.
All this time the robots were picking up the stuff and putting it in a pile and one of them went and got a basket and put it all into the basket and carried it off to be stored with all the other boxes in one of the rock-hewn chambers.
But they didn't get it all, for my grandfather, with no one seeing him, picked up a coin and secreted it about his person and I now will wrap this coin, which he passed on to me, and put it in this envelope…
Chapter 7
I stopped reading and looked across the fire at Cynthia Lansing.
'The coin?' I asked.
She nodded. 'It was in the envelope, wrapped in a piece of foil, a kind of foil that has not been used for centuries. I gave it to Professor Thorndyke and asked him if he'd keep it…'
'But did he know what it was?'
'He wasn't sure. He took it to another man. An expert on old Earth coins and such. It was an uncirculated Athenian owl, probably minted a few years after a battle fought at a place called Marathon.'
'Uncirculated?' Elmer asked.
'It had not been used. There was no wear on it. When a coin is circulated it becomes smooth and dull from much handling. But aside from some deterioration due to time, this one was exactly as it had been the day that it was struck.'
'And there can't be any doubt?' I asked.
'Professor Thorndyke said there could be none at all.'
The baying of the dogs still could be heard beyond the ridge that rose above our camp. It was a lonely and a savage sound and I shivered as I listened to it and moved closer to the fire.
'They are after something,' Elmer said. 'Maybe coon or possum. The hunters are back there somewhere, listening to the dogs.'
'But what are they hunting for?' asked Cynthia. 'The men, I mean, the men who sent out the dogs.'
'For sport and meat,' said Elmer.
I saw her wince.
'This is no Alden planet,' Elmer told her. 'No planet soft and full of pinkness. The people who live back here in the woods are probably one-half savage.'
We sat listening and the baying of the dogs seemed to move away.
'On this treasure business,' Elmer said, 'leave us try to figure out what we have. Somewhere in this country to the west of us someone came fleeing out of Greece and hid out a bunch of boxes, some of which probably contained treasure. We know one of them did and some of the others may have. But the location might be a little hard to come by. It's indefinite. A river flowing from the north into the old Ohio. There might be quite a lot of streams coming from the north…'
'There was a hut,' said Cynthia.
'That was ten thousand years ago. The hut must be long gone. We'd be looking for a hole, a tunnel, and that
