The Ultimate Invader by Donald A Wollheim (ed)

Author:Donald A Wollheim (ed) [Wollheim, Donald A]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

The Near Past

THE MALIGNANT MARAUDER by Murray Leinster

FROM beginning to end, it was Pete Marshall’s show. His show, and the knife’s.

Marshall had a big reputation as an archaeologist, and there’s no question but that he’d earned it. But the knife ruined him professionally. It was a steel knife. Moreover, it was a stainless steel knife, and Marshall claimed it was at least eight thousand years old, and, he believed, more. But you don’t have to know archaeology to realize that people weren’t using steel knives eight thousand years ago, much less stainless steel ones. It was absurd.

As a result Marshall was ruined professionally. When you compared the knife with the primitive pottery and chipped flints Marshall claimed to have found with it, it didn’t make sense! Still, he got moderately rich out of his patent on the new stainless-steel alloy, and then sank most of the money in a new, select expedition to go back to Yucatan and hunt for some more.

He took just two other men with him, Bill Apsley and Jeff Burroughs, but they were good. Burroughs, in his stolid fashion, knew as much about primitive man as anybody else in America. Apsley wasn’t so much of a specialist, but he had an intuitive way of seeing through archaeological problems that had made sense out of nonsense before. In his fashion, he was brilliant.

The three of them sailed with a lot of very special apparatus, and unloaded at a tiny port in Yucatan.

The three white men and the gang they gathered spent four days reaching the place where Marshall claimed he’d found the knife. His trenches were halfway filled in and already overgrown with jungle-stuff.

His gang cleaned them out in a hurry and they spent two weeks doing more work. Of course he wasn’t digging up a whole city area. He was looking for something, not uncovering a site. And he found what he was looking for. Or rather, he didn’t find what he didn’t expect to find. He didn’t find any more knives.

The remains of the ancient settlement were there, all right, and the expedition breezed through them. Artifacts were photographed in situ, uncovered, and packed. Ashes were picked

over, dirt sifted, everything neatly catalogued, and on again with the trench.

It was archaeology in high gear, and at the end of it Apsley and Burroughs were pleased and happy. They had materials for a fairly complete study of a pre-Mayan culture that had never even been guessed at before.

It seemed to have vanished without traces in the culture of later peoples. And Apsley said flatly that eight thousand years was much too low an estimate of the culture-age. He put it much farther back, about contemporary with the Cro-Magnons of Europe, which was twenty to twenty-five thousand years ago.

“Do you still insist you found that knife here?” asked Apsley.

Marshall nodded without resentment.

“I always figured that it came from somewhere else,” he said. “So I had some air-photo topographic maps made of all the country for a long way around.

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