I took it, although nothing was ever harder for me to do. Kramer hurriedly stepped into the breach. "Mr.—ah—Wetzel, we're waiting for you to repeat what you told us before."

The tall, broad-shouldered young man turned from me to face the long table. There was a graceful dignity about him, in his posture, in the way he held his head, that you don't see often. Again I felt the hair move along my scalp. For a guy who was as nutty as peanut brittle, he was certainly convincing in his role of frontiersman. Turn back the clock far enough and this could have been one of General Anthony Wayne's scouts at the battle of Fallen Timbers. He even smelled the part.

"My father got hisself put on by General Harmer as a scout a fortnight back. The General, on orders from President Washington, was to lead his sojers to the north after the Injuns up there. Pop allowed as I was ready to try my luck agin the abbregynes, so he took me along.

"Three-four nights after we set out ahead the rest, Pop an' me come onto fresh Injun signs. We move powerful careful through the woods an' right soon we catch sight of camp fires. There's a whole grist of them red devils prancin' around, all fixed out in war paint—more of 'em as I ever see'd afore. Even Pop allows as how it bugs out his eyes—and Pop's a man to do an amount of travelin'."

It was a page torn out of technicolor nightmare: three of the world's most important men hanging onto the words of a madman who claimed to be an Eighteenth Century Indian scout in the employ of one of George Washington's generals. Yet the man's every word, every gesture, everything he wore, was as authentic to that period as the powder horn around his neck.

"We draw back in the woods aways an' wait. It's gettin' along to'ard sun-up, an' Pop says he aims to get a better idea how many Injuns they is, an' what tribes. Most of the braves got nice new British guns an' General Harmer'll want to know about that."

Wetzel's voice began to shake a little, remembering. "Pop an' me are hidin' in a clump of sumac when this here sudden racket starts up, equal to a hundred waterfalls goin' all at oncet. We look up in the air where it's comin' from, and holy hokey if fallin' right out of the sky ain't this round iron thing! Flat as a hoe-cake an' big around as an acre of land, with the fires of Hell breathin' at its edges!

"Well sir, them Injuns lit a shuck out of there like the spirits was after them. My legs were tryin' to run, too. But Pop takes a holt on my arm an' says, 'By Janey, I aim to see this if'en I swing for it!'

"It drops down," Wetzel continued, demonstrating with a slow graceful movement of his hand, "lookin' no less than a big shiny stove-lid, an' settles in the clearin' as light an' easy as the feather off'en a duck's back. It stands high as a Pennsylvany school house an' twicet the size around, an' no sound from it at all."

He stood slim and straight as a Shawnee arrow, smooth-faced and solemn, obviously not much past his twentieth birthday, yet by his own account born before the Declaration of Independence was on paper. He went on talking, sounding like a character out of James Fenimore Cooper. His story, boiled down and translated, came out something like this:

The sudden arrival of the strange object had literally paralyzed the Indian encampment. The warriors dropped their weapons and called on the spirits to protect them, while a hole opened in the side of what couldn't be anything else but a spaceship. Then out of the opening came huge steel caricatures of men. There were over a dozen of these robots, each the height of two men, and their eyes were strange round circles of faceted glass. In single file they moved down the ramp and stalked through the ranks of fear-frozen Indians, disappearing into the forest.

Enoch's father ordered his son to crawl up into a tree out of sight, then shouldered his rifle and slipped away through the bushes to get a better look at what was going on. Enoch "allowed" that his Pop was a "moughty" brave man, and none of his audience gave him an argument on that score.

From his place among the leaves, Enoch watched his father melt into the trees. The sun was above the horizon by this time and the young frontiersman discovered that his present position was the equivalent of a box seat on the fifty-yard line.

The next figure to emerge from the spaceship brought an amazed murmur from hundreds of throats. No twelve-foot robot this time, no alien monster beyond description. Very simply, this was an Indian.

Yet what an Indian! He stood on the ramp, wearing only leather breeches and unadorned moccasins, muscles rippling across a powerful sun-tanned chest, his head thrown back in a posture of arrogant dignity. He wore a single crimson feather in his black topknot, and at his belt was a tomahawk only slightly less deadly looking than a howitzer.

Arms folded across his chest, he swept his stunned audience with an eye like an eagle's, then began to speak. His voice, deep and ringing, carried beyond the edges of the crowd, so that Enoch was able to catch a portion of what he was saying.

Wetzel admitted he understood very little of any of the Indian tongues. He thought the one he was hearing had its roots in the Delaware tribe, but admitted this was no more than a guess. However, it appeared that the visitor was summoning the chiefs of the assembled tribes to a meeting within the spaceship.

Evidently it took some doing. Faced with a familiar danger, there is no human more courageous than an Indian. But the thought of entering the yawning maw of that steel cavern would have shaken the nerves of Manabus himself.

Finally the visiting Indian's oratory paid off, and nine or ten of the tribal leaders reluctantly entered the spaceship. Two robots took up positions on the ramp to discourage kibitzers, and after an hour or so in which nothing more happened, the rest of the camp returned pretty much to normal.

Mid-afternoon came and passed, and still the meeting inside the ship went on. Enoch was finding the tree branch not the most comfortable place to spend a weekend, and he was growing steadily more uneasy by his father's continued absence.

More hours passed. The sun was gone now and campfires began to dot the night. Orders or no orders, Enoch decided, he was going to find his Pop. With a stealth equal to that of any Indian, he dropped to the ground and began a cautious advance in the direction his father had taken hours before.

Suddenly the bushes crashed apart directly in front of him, and his father came bounding through. Only a few yards back, its giant strides rapidly closing the gap, came one of the huge steel men.

Enoch's gun flashed up and he fired without aiming. The bullet struck one of the robot's huge eyes, shattering the glass and sending the towering figure crashing headlong into a tree. At the same instant, an ear-shattering wail came from the fallen robot, and powerful rays of light flashed from the rim of the spaceship to bathe the spot where the two Wetzels stood.

Mixed with the siren wail from the fallen man of steel came a chorus of blood-curdling warhoops as the Indians made out the figures of the two men, and a hundred braves came pouring across the clearing toward them. Instantly the two scouts took to their heels, darting through the inky blackness of the forest with the sure-footed celerity of long practice.

They would have escaped easily under ordinary circumstances. But suddenly the blast of another siren sounded directly ahead and a lance of light impaled them. Blinded, they stumbled aside, only to be caught by still another beam.

The two men split apart and dived for cover. Enoch, finding himself shielded from the rays by the thick bole of a tree, scrambled into its branches. A moment later the first wave of Indians passed below him.

For fully ten minutes he crouched there among the leaves. The barrage of light, he discovered, had come from