that might apply. Something had been stuck in the back of Indy's mind longer than he liked because he still couldn't fit it in with events taking place around them. During the work of arming the Ford TriMotor, Henshaw had mentioned a French scientist, Henri Coanda, who had worked on a rocket gun during the Great War. One of his other experiments had involved some kind of new engine that operated like a giant torch. Indy made a mental note to pursue that issue further with Henshaw.
But for now they were far back in history, and he expected Henshaw to help keep things moving steadily. He was right.
'Example.' Henshaw could cut right to the bone.
'The cave wall paintings and carvings in China's Hunan Province,' began Indy. 'They were dug with very sharp rocks, or flint; they were colored with ochre and pigments of unknown origin; and they show cylindrical vessels moving through the sky. I'd like to use them for reference, but you have whatever value they contain in this brief description. We're not even certain whether they were created by Homo sapiens or prehumans. On the matter that concerns us, it has no bearing.'
'Agreed,' Castilano said with a nod.
'Go on,' Henshaw directed.
'May I?' They turned to Gale. 'I believe you must adopt the same rules for Chih-Chiang-Tsu-Yu.'
'Who is?' Henshaw asked.
'Not is. Was,' Gale emphasized. 'He was the lead engineer in the royal court of China's Emperor Yao. I'd love to be able to question him myself,' she sighed. 'His records are astonishing. He described an encounter with an alien race come to earth, claimed that their craft shone in the heavens, and stated he actually made a flight to the moon and back with the aliens.'
'How long ago was this?' asked Henshaw. He was taken aback as those more familiar with the truly ancient records smiled at his question. 'Four thousand three hundred years,' Gale answered. 'I mentioned this item because Tsu-Yu even described columns of luminous air—'
'A rocket?' Henshaw asked, incredulous.
Gale shrugged. 'Who knows? Indy warned us against extrapolation, so all I'm doing is establishing a framework of historical reference.'
'Look, if we wanted to refer to a catalogue of such moments, we could. And we'd be justified,' Indy said patiently.
'There are records of visitations from outer space all through man's history, from every culture, and throughout every age. I could make a great case out of the Surya Sutradhara. That's an ancient text from India in which astronomical events were recorded with incredible accuracy. And not by dewyeyed stargazers, but by the Siddas and the Vidyaharas—' 'What the devil are those?' Cromwell burst out.
'Not what; who,' Indy replied. 'They were the scientists of India. They also described flights in alien spacecraft and then went on to write down how they flew, and this is a quote, 'below the moon but above the clouds.'
'I will be . . . I mean . . . that is so bloody hard to believe!' Cromwell stammered.
'Your belief, mine, anyone else's,' Indy told him, 'is not the issue. The accuracy of such reports, and how they may or may not relate to what our own people have come to believe are starships from Mars, or whatever . . .
that's the issue.'
'Then we can hardly ignore the Santander caves of Spain, can we?' They turned to Henshaw, who held up both hands. 'Sorry, I'm no archeologist or historian.
But when I was in Spain I happened to be in that area, and what I heard sent me there quickly enough. I could hardly believe what I saw. Beautiful paintings in prehistoric caves. Paintings of discs moving through the sky.'
'And in more places than Spain,' Castilano offered. 'In fact, Indy and I ran into each other once on the Tassili Plateau. That's the Saharan region. Cave paintings of discs there as well.'
'The point is, we've brought up these places and their times,' Indy said to move them along, 'and there isn't a blasted thing we can do with this information except say, okay, here it is, here's what it depicts, we can't explain it, although we can debate from now to forever. Let me save all of us some time. Even as early as the fifteenth century B.C., people in North Africa were seeing all sorts of discs in the sky. Historians reported they flew with great precision, whatever that meant in the terms of those days.
'Now, in a.d. 747, the Chinese left records of flaming objects cruising overhead and climbing. So we're getting a bit warmer.'
'What about the German sightings at Nuremburg in 1561?' asked Castilano.
'Thousands of witnesses saw cylinders, discs, spheres—'
'They saw the same thing in 1883 in Zacatecas,' Gale broke in.
'Is that in Mexico?' Jocko inquired.
'Give the man a cigar,' Indy told him. 'You got it, friend. Only this time the sky was busier than Times Square on Saturday night. The locals saw more than four hundred aerial torpedos and discs. But we don't have to go that far back. It was, um, 1896 and 1897, right in the United States. California, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, and so forth. All of a sudden people—thousands of people who were sober, reliable witnesses—saw strange airships all over the place.
Including a bunch of them that landed. They spoke English, German, and some foreign languages nobody could understand. They also took off and then climbed with what people said was terrific speed.'
'And bloody well showed up again,' Cromwell said. 'In England, about twelve years later. They seemed much more advanced than the American visitors, but airships they were, all right.'
'Zeppelins, no doubt,' Henshaw remarked.
'No way,' Indy stepped in. 'At that time Germany had but three zeppelins flying, and they had poor performance.
