He pointed dramatically toward the sky. "From a great distance. Up
there are many worlds."
"Tell me of your world," I said.
The telling took a long time but not a word of it was dull. According
to Lo-as-ro, his world was a planet revolving about one of the stars
in the Big Dipper. It was slightly smaller than Earth, with about the
same climates and development of life. It was peopled with only one
race, the Orbiwah, who lived much as the Indians in America did before
the arrival of the white man. Recently spaceships from another planet
in the same solar system had landed on the Orbiwah world. These
newcomers were friendly, had no thought of conquest, and possessed a
science and culture of amazing proportions.
* * * * *
From them the Orbiwah learned of a planet on which were men of their
own kind. Lo-as-ro, fired by the thought of establishing contact with
people like himself, had borrowed spaceships manned by robots and
crossed the void to Earth. For weeks they had hovered in our
atmosphere, at first saddened, then angered, by the fate meted out to
the Indians.
Since the spaceships were able to move through Time into the past,
Lo-as-ro hit on the idea of going back to the days when the Indian was
still in control of most of America. With the power at his control he
could force the white man from the continent and restore the land to
those who owned it.
Arriving near the close of the Eighteenth Century, he found a sizeable
encampment of Indians, brought the ship down among them, and summoned
the chiefs to a Council of War, where he outlined to them his plan. To
his astonishment he found the chiefs suspicious of outside help and
confident that they could defeat the white man alone. In vain did
Lo-as-ro explain that they were doomed; they could not, or would not,
believe that he had visited the future. He offered to take them ahead
and let them see for themselves--an offer that was quickly refused.
Whereupon Lo-as-ro decided to return to the Present and wrest the land
from the white man and hand it over to the downtrodden remnants of a
once-powerful race. It was on that return trip that Wetzel had arrived
in the present century.
When Lo-as-ro finished, I leaned back against the side of the ship and
lit a cigarette, bringing a startled grunt from the chief. I said,
"You cannot defeat the white man, Lo-as-ro. He has weapons such as you
have never dreamed: machines that can throw things that explode and
kill hundreds of braves at one time, machines that travel through the
air as does the one you came in, things that can wipe out all life
within a circle as wide as a brave can ride around in one day on a
fast horse.
"No, noble Lo-as-ro. Return to your world and leave this one to the
white man. He took it long ago and he will never give it up. I have
spoken."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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