Each world had been razed more recently, and each with the same curious curse. The race had risen to a high culture, and then had seemingly been wiped out in a few brief years. The destruction had accounted for all life on the planet, other than vegetable—and had wiped out even the bones. All that had been left was a collection of weapons and relics of more doubtful use.
The pattern was the same. The direction was steadily toward Earth, leaping from planet to planet at jumps of thousands of years apart, or perhaps mere hundreds. This planet must have been attacked less than five hundred years before, though it was hard to tell without controlled study of decay here.
Even now Earth might be suffering the invasion! They had been gone nearly three years. And during that time, the monsters might have swooped down hideously out of space.
They might return to find the Earth a wasteland!
His thoughts were a turmoil that grew worse as he stared at the poster. The unknown artist had done his job well. A feeling of horror poured out of it, filling him with an insensate desire to find such monstrosities and rend and maim them, as they had tormented the unfortunate green people.
Graves came stomping up to the control room, carrying lunch, and took one look at the picture. "Serves the heathens right," he grumbled. "Look at them. In hell, suffering from the lashes of the devils of the pit. And still holding up that heathen charm."
Lenk blinked. But Graves' idea wasn't too fantastic, at that. The creatures did look like devils, and the T-shaped object might be a religious symbol. Hadn't some faith or other used the tau cross in its worship? And those objects on the third world back had resembled swastikas, which were another religious symbol on Earth.
That part fitted. During periods of extreme stress or danger, man sought some home in his faith. Was it so unnatural that alien races might do the same?
"Isn't there anything hopeful in your religion, Graves?" he asked bitterly, wondering what the man had been like before his conversion to the rigidity he now possessed. He'd probably been as violent an atheist. Usually, a fanatic who switched sides became doubly fanatical.
The revival of religious devotion had begun some fifteen years before, and from what Lenk had seen, the world had been a better and more kindly place for it. But there would always be those who thought the only true devotion lay in the burning of witches. Or maybe Graves needed psychiatric treatment for his morose moods were becoming suspiciously psychotic, and his fanaticism might be only a sign of deeper trouble.