"Sid, you remember in our Indian studies, again and again, we meet the medicine man who has visions. Even modern ones have done things that are pretty impossible to explain. I believe they have spiritual powers beyond the capability of the white man. The prehistoric medicine men may have developed this power even more. I think the old man there is their medicine man."
"So?" Sidney invited.
"I'm just supposing now, mind you," George went on. He rubbed his bald pate again as though afraid of what thoughts were taking place under it. "Maybe way back—a good many hundreds of years ago—this medicine man decided to have a vision of the future. And it worked. And here he is now with some of his people."
"Wait a minute," Sidney objected. "So he had this vision and transported these people to this moment in time. But if it was hundreds of years ago they're already dead, been dead for a long time, so how could they—"
"Don't you see, Sid? They can be dead, but their appearance in the future—for them—couldn't occur until now because it's happened with us and we weren't living and didn't come along here at the right time until this minute."
Sidney swallowed. "Maybe," he muttered, "maybe."
"Another thing," George said. "If we can talk with them we can learn everything we've tried to know in all our work and solve in a minute what we're ready to spend the whole summer, even years, digging for."
Sidney brightened. "That's what we wanted to do."
George studied the Indians again. "I think they're just as surprised as we are. When they discovered themselves here and saw us—and you must remember we're the first white men they've ever seen—their immediate instinct was to attack. Now that we don't fight back they're waiting for us to make a move."
"What do we do?"