ing the
words of wisdom uttered by others.

"And Arcot," continued Morey, releasing Wade from his condescending
stare, "is Jove, hurling the rockfusing, destroying thunderbolts!"

"The Gods that my friends have been talking of," explained Arcot to the
curious Ortolians, "are legendary deities of Earth. I can see now that
we did leave an imprint on history in the only way we could--as Gods,
for surely no other explanation could have occurred to those men."

The days passed swiftly in the ship, as their work approached
completion. Finally, when the last of the equation of Time, artificial
matter, and the most awful of their weapons, the unlimited Cosmic Power,
had been calculated, they fell to the last stage of the work. The actual
appliances were designed. Then the completed apparatus that the Ortolian
and the Talsonian had been working on, was carefully investigated by the
terrestrial physicists, and its mechanism studied. Arcot had great plans
for this, and now it was incorporated in their control apparatus.

The one remaining problem was their exact location in time. Already
their progress had brought them well up to the nineteenth century, but,
as Morey sadly remarked, they couldn't tell what date, for they were
sadly lacking in history. Had they known the real date, for instance, of
the famous battle of Bull Run, they could have watched it in the
telectroscope, and so determined their time. As it was, they knew only
that it was one of the periods of the first half of the decade of 1860.

"As historians, we're a bunch of first-class kitchen mechanics. Looks
like we're due for another landing to locate the exact date," agreed
Arcot.

"Why land now? Let's wait until we are nearer the time to which we
belong, so we won't have to watch so carefully and so long," suggested
Wade.

They argued this question for about two hundred years as a matter of
fact. After that, it was academic anyway.

Chapter XVI

HOME AGAIN

They were getting very near their own time, Arcot felt. Indeed, they
must already exist on Earth. "One thing that puzzles me," he commented,
"is what would happen if we were to go down now, and see ourselves."

"Either we can't or we don't want to do it," pointed out Morey, "because
we didn't."

"I think the answer is that nothing can exist two times at the same
time-rate," said Arcot. "As long as we were in a different time-rate we
could exist at two times. When we tried to exist simultan