Before anyone could respond the screen again blurred as thousands of images flashed by. It was dizzying to watch the rapid flickering, but soon it again slowed and then stopped.
“Ah, this is much better,” Arak exclaimed. Now the view was of a castle erected on a rocky prominence that was hosting a tournament of some kind. The vantage point was significantly higher than the previous scene. The coloration of the vegetation around the castle walls suggested midautumn. The courtyard was packed with boisterous people whose voices formed a muted murmur. Everyone was dressed in colorful medieval attire. Heraldic pennants snapped in the breeze. At either end of a long, low log fence running down the center of the courtyard, two knights were in the final preparations for a joust. Their colorfully caparisoned horses were facing each other, pawing with excitement.
“How are these pictures taken?” Perry asked. He was transfixed by the image.
“It’s a standard recording device,” Arak said.
“I mean from what vantage point?” Perry asked. “Some kind of helicopter?”
Arak and Sufa laughed. “Excuse our giggles,” Arak said. “A helicopter is your technology. Not ours. Besides, such a vehicle would be too intrusive. These images were taken by a small, silent, unmanned antigravity ship hovering at about twenty thousand feet.”
“Hey, Hollywood does this stuff all the time,” Richard said. “Big deal! This is not proof.”
“If this is a set it’s the most realistic one I’ve ever seen,” Suzanne said. She leaned closer. As far as she was concerned the detail was far more than Hollywood was capable of.
As they watched, the attendant pages of the armored knights stepped back, and the men-at-arms lowered their lances. With a crisp fanfare sounding, the two horses charged forward on opposites sides of the log fence. As they bore down on each other the cheering of the crowd mushroomed. Then, just before the horsemen made contact, the screen went blank. A moment later it reverted back to its initial phosphorescent blue. A message window popped up and said: “Scene censored. Apply to Council of Elders.”
“Damn!” Michael voiced. “I was getting into it. Who the hell won: the guy in green or the guy in red?”
“Richard’s right,” Donald said suddenly, ignoring Michael. “These scenes can be staged too easily.”
“Perhaps,” Arak said without taking the slightest offense. “But I can show you whatever you want. We wouldn’t be able to stage the full complement of first-generation history subject to your on-the-spot whim.”
“How about something more ancient?” Perry suggested. “How about Neolithic times in the same location where the castle was.”
“Clever idea!” Arak said. “I’ll plug in the coordinates without a specific time other than, say, prior to ten thousand years ago, and let the search engine see if there is an image in storage.”
The screen again came to life. Once again images flashed by. This time the flashing continued much longer.
Suzanne touched Perry’s arm. She leaned toward him when he turned to her. “I think we’re looking at real images,” she said.
“I do, too,” Perry said. “Can you imagine the technology involved!”
“I’m thinking less about the technology than the fact that this place is real,” Suzanne whispered. “We’re not dreaming all this.”
“Ah!” Arak commented. “I can tell the search has found something. And the time frame will be in the twenty-five-thousand-year range.” As he spoke, the images slowed and again stopped.
The scene was the same rocky prominence although there was no castle. Instead the crown of the hill was dominated by a short escarpment undercut in the center to form a shallow cave. Grouped around the entrance to the cave was an assemblage of Neanderthals clothed in fur and working on crude implements.
“It does look like the same place,” Perry commented.
As everyone watched, the image telescoped in on the domestic scene.
“And the pictures are clearer,” Perry added.
“At that time we didn’t worry about our ships being seen,” Arak explained, “so we felt comfortable dropping down to a mere hundred feet or so to study behavior.”
As they watched, one of the Neanderthal men straightened up from scraping a hide. In the process of stretching he happened to look straight up. When he did, his brutish face suddenly went blank, and his mouth dropped open in a mixture of surprise and terror. The image on the screen was close enough and clear enough to reveal his large square teeth.
“Well,” Arak commented, “here’s an example of our antigravity drone being seen. The poor devil probably thinks he’s being visited by the gods.”
“My gosh,” Suzanne said. “He’s trying to get the others to look up!”
“Their language was very limited,” Arak said. “But I know that there was another subspecies in this same time frame and in the same general area that you called the Cro-Magnon. Their language skills were far better.”
The Neanderthal grunted and leaped up and down while pointing toward the camera. Soon the entire group was looking skyward. Several of the women with young children immediately scooped their babies into their arms and disappeared into the cave while others dashed out.
One enterprising man bent down, picked up an egg-sized stone, and hurled it skyward. The missile approached, then went out of sight to the side.
“Not a bad arm,” Michael said. “The Red Sox could use him out in center field.”
Arak touched his console and the image faded. At the same time the lights went up in the room. Everyone moved back in their seats. Arak and Sufa looked around the room. The visitors were all quiet for the moment, even Richard.
“What was the supposed date of that recording?” Perry asked finally.
Arak consulted his console. “In your calendar it would have been July fourteenth, twenty-three three forty-twoB.C.”
“Didn’t it bother you people that your camera platform was seen?” Suzanne asked. The image of the Neanderthal’s face was haunting her.
“We were starting to be concerned about detection,” Arak agreed. “There was even some talk among our conservative wing at the time to eliminate cognitive beings from the surface of the earth.”
“Why would you be concerned about such primitive people?” Perry asked.
“Purely to avoid detection,” Arak said. “Obviously twenty-five thousand years ago, due to the primitivism of your civilization, it didn’t matter. But we knew it would, eventually. We know that our ships have been sighted occasionally even in your modern times, and it does concern us. Thankfully the sightings have mostly been greeted with disbelief, or if not with disbelief then with the idea that our interplanetary ships have come from someplace else in the universe, not from within the earth itself.”
“Wait a second,” Donald said suddenly. “I don’t like to rain on anyone’s parade, but I don’t think this little show you’re putting on here proves anything at all. It would be too easy to pull this off with computer-generated images. Why don’t you cut all this gibberish, and just tell us who you represent and what you want from us.”
For a moment no one spoke. Arak and Sufa leaned over and consulted with one another sotto voce. Then they conferred with Ismael and Mary. After a short, hushed conference, the hosts repositioned themselves back in their chairs. Arak looked directly at Donald.
“Mr. Fuller, your skepticism is fully understandable,” Arak said. “We’re not sure everyone else shares your suspicions. Perhaps later they can influence your opinion. Of course there will be more proof as your introduction proceeds, and I’m confident that you will be won over. Meanwhile, we’d like to beg for your patience for a while longer.”
Donald did not respond. He merely glared back at Arak.
“Let’s move on,” Arak said. “And allow me to give you a capsule history of Interterra. To do that we must begin in your domain, the earth’s surface. Life there began about five hundred million years after the earth formed and took several billion years to evolve. Your earth scientists are well aware of this. What they are not aware of is that we, the first-generation humans, evolved about five hundred and fifty million years ago during evolution’s first phase. The reason your scientists are unaware of this first phase is because almost the entire fossilized record of it disappeared during a time we call the Dark Period. More about that later. First we have some images of these early times of our civilization, but the quality is not good.”