"We may have had once, Captain. You're forgetting the time phase. This planet is the Earth as it was millennia in the past, in the age of the great glaciers. The ice cap here has obviously reached its maximum penetration. It will begin to recede now, decade by decade, and civilization will slowly take root where now there is nothing but primitive savagery."
"Civilization, out of that brain, Baiel?"
He smiled at the ape-face of the corpse. "Not that, but the one that comes after. Perhaps the new man will evolve, Captain." Baiel licked his lips thoughtfully. "Or perhaps he will be created."
"I don't think I quite follow—"
"Created by the gods!" Laughing, Baiel ripped off his laboratory jacket and flung it over the corpse. "I think, Captain, that we shouldn't tell the others about him quite yet. You and I have some investigating to do first."
The next morning Baiel called me into the control room. When the door was shut, he turned up the viewscreen. By adjusting the angle of the beam, he had focused the projection upon the Olympus and the frozen terrain surrounding the ship in a ten mile radius.
The ship lay on a tilted, empty meadow above a forest of pines. Five miles away a limestone cliff rose out of the forest. A crude, semicircular clearing was beneath the cliff and on it we saw a tribe of men and women gathered around a fire built at the mouth of a cave. Baiel turned up a section enlargement and we studied the men carefully. There was no doubt that they were the counterparts of the corpse lying in the laboratory of the Olympus.
That same morning Baiel and I made our first visit to the village. Fortunately we went armed, for they received us with violent hostility, attempting to drive us away with a volley of spears.
A peculiar greeting from a people we now understand to be cordial and open in their friendship! But their motivation was entirely logical. Faced by a diminishing source of food, the tribe saw every stranger as a potential threat to tribal survival.
Baiel and I used our Haydens to curb their belligerence. The sight of red flame blasting their spears into dust awed them into a sullen kind of submission. But it was not until our second visit, when we took them a gift of bear meat, that we began to make any progress in communication.