Scarface grinned at them. "Yes," he said. "We call it that, because we have inhabited at least a dozen solar systems and are still growing. Let me continue the story...."
Mlargn had chosen a group of children because he knew they could be trained and conditioned easier. When he returned through the Chronotron to his own time, the Xlarnan immortals considered the human captives to be unimaginable, short-lived, soft-skinned bipeds, but amazingly advanced mammalia from the evolutionary viewpoint. And they could think, in a primitive fashion. Moreover, they proved to be incredibly fertile.
Only slightly encouraged, the Xlarnans threw them into a Chronotron cycle of five hundred thousand years. The resultant race and alternate time proved to be something for which they were totally unprepared. Since the continuum between Cause and Effect was a simultaneous structure in time, there it was, complete from beginning to end—a superman civilization that encompassed great stretches of the galaxy. An alien brand of intelligence. Virile resourcefulness and aggressiveness, far outstripping the sterile civilization of Xlarn.
Astounded and frightened, the Xlarnans sought to trace the beginnings of this alternate time, through the Chronotron, and throttle the totally unexpected development at its source. However, this was foreseen by the civilization which had sprung from the Chronotron—and there was war. The Xlarnans were eliminated, except for one, who swore vengeance.
This unsuspected immortal was he who had brought back the ancestors of the star men from beyond Beginning, from the world where the moon was young. This was Mlargn, himself.
Although the star men had abandoned the dying solar system of their origin, it was inevitable that a few of their number should be left behind—castaways who finally organized themselves, built a citadel of their own, and sought to build a small star ship in which to escape the threat of the reaction sphere. But the specialized science that had developed the hyper-space drive eluded them and they struggled in vain, while Mlargn besieged them, jealously endeavoring to discover what they were accomplishing. He applied his warfare so vigorously that one day only Kimnar was left, with two youngsters. In fact, they were babes.
In desperation, Kimnar gained access to the Chronotron. Hoping to create another alternate time, he hurled himself and the two children into further depths of time than he intended.
And Mlargn followed him. Aware of his own immortality and equipped with controls that could reverse his course in time because they were interlocked with the Chronotron, he was determined to spend centuries, if necessary, to find those two advanced children and use them to his own advantage....
Henry shook his head to clear it. "Just a moment," he said. "I might extrapolate from all this that you are Kimnar."
"I am," smiled Scarface. "I arrived with you two in the human era, in Earth's calendar year nineteen hundred forty-four A.D., on June 6th, to be exact. The country was France. The place—Caen...."
There was a stunned moment of silence. Then Martia's eyes widened. "But that was—!"
"Yes," said Kimnar, smiling grimly. "The Allied invasion of Normandie. I landed right in the middle of D-Day."
"What happened?" asked Henry. "I mean—to you?"
"I was injured by shrapnel. That's how I acquired the scar on my face. I woke up later in a hospital and have been looking for you two ever since."
"Kimnar," said Henry, "are Martia and I sister and brother?"
Martia's mind leaped out to find the answer in Kimnar's thoughts before he could speak. "No!" she cried, happily. "We're not!" Henry suddenly found her in his arms.
"She's right," Kimnar confirmed.
"You two were survivors of Mlargn's attack in those days when Jirahn was alive—but you were not of the same family."
"Who was Jirahn?"
Kimnar waved a hand toward the great instrument panel. "It was he who invented that hyper-space transceiver. Or rather, he re-invented it, remembering much of the science of our kin, the star men. Just before Mlargn's powerful attack, in which he utilized a deadly radiation that killed everybody in the citadel, I believe Jirahn succeeded in contacting the star men. But I could not be certain, as I had been away from the citadel when the attack came. Upon my return, I found my friends dead, and Jirahn sat slumped over those controls with the head gear attached to him. Certain lights were signalling to me from the board, but I could not decipher them. Moreover, I feared that Mlargn would find the right teleporter frequency to tie his system in with ours, and that he might surprise me at any time. So I removed the bodies, dumping them into the sea, and prepared, generally, to 'abandon ship.' Just as I was about to leave, I found you two halfway down the cliffs on a covered terrace that your parents had been in the habit of using. They had left you there for your naps. It was then that I conceived the idea of finding the Chronotron and trying to create a new alternate time based on your descendants."
"But Kimnar," persisted Henry. "What about that transceiver? You worked it when we first arrived here, and I remember you mentioned something about 'waiting for results.'"
Kimnar shrugged. "I tried the thing, and to the best of my knowledge I was transmitting through hyper-space at full power. So far, there has been no response. I have the receiver wide open."
"Do you mean—it is conceivable that some of the star people might return for us?"
Kimnar smiled in a puzzling sort of way. "I tossed them the bait," he said. "I think they'll consider the risk worth while—if they received my message."
"What risk is there now? I'm quite sure Weston finished Mlargn off."
Kimnar raised his eyes heavenward. "Remember? The reaction sphere could go any time. Fortunately, most of the harder radiations are expending themselves convexly, into outer space, and what is shooting towards us still has many miles to travel. But it's getting very unhealthy around here. When the sphere blows, it will take the Great Ring with it—the ring that used to be the moon."
Simultaneously, Henry and Martia thought of something else. The other passengers, their original companions. What of them—and Weston, with his gun?
"We can't leave them here to die," said Henry. "What about the Chronotron? Can't we send them all back?"
Kimnar shook his head. "The Chronotron is not that accurate at such long range. Only a few people at a time can go through, and they might land anywhere, from Earth's prehistoric ages to Xlarn's eras of development ante-dating the generation of an oxygen content atmosphere. Moreover, Mlargn changed the location of the Chronotron. I have not been able to find it. That was what I originally went back to look for when I left you on the beach after that fight with Weston."
"Wait a minute!" cried Martia. "But my moth—I mean, Lady Dewitt and those others found it!"
Kimnar looked at both of them wonderingly. Briefly, they told him about the alternate time episode involving New Bretania and Texania, which Mlargn successfully nipped in the bud.
"I must have been underground somewhere at the time," said Kimnar, "traveling through various teleporters. Otherwise, had I been on the surface, I have enough temporal perspective, myself, to have been able to remember that alternate time experience." He frowned. "If Weston ever finds the Chronotron—"
"Well, why not?" asked Martia. "You couldn't blame them for going back—or trying to!"
"I see what he means," said Henry. "If any of them should go back to the approximate time from which we started and do anything to circumvent that moon experiment—"
"Whatmoon experiment?" asked Martia.
"I forgot to tell you, I guess. Kimnar knew because he read it in Uncle Andy's mind. Uncle Andy as Andrew Dearden, is one of the world's greatest rocket specialists. He was just returning from Africa on that plane after having supervised all preparations for firing a rocket at the moon."
"Thatisamazing," said Martia, "but—oh!" She read the rest in Henry's mind. The rocket carried the world's first D-C bomb, which letters represented the word, "de-cohesion." In detonation, the bomb was supposed to liberate the cohesive forces of the proton. They were going to observe its effects on the moon.
"I believe," said Henry, "that it produced a sustained reaction in stable matter, and the moon blew to fragments, thus creating the Great Ring. The thermal effects plus orbital perturbations of the Earth destroyed all life on the planet. And I deduce that the free oxygen and hydrogen in our atmosphere made some kind of critical mixture and wentfoom! The result was H2O, oceans of it. And so time began again, biologically speaking, anyway."
"If Andrew Dearden or any of his kind get back there and manage to abolish the 'D-C' bomb," said Kimnar, "then Xlarn will never have been, and neither you nor I nor Galactic Civilization, with its myriad worlds and metropoli and billions of star people and all their science and culture, shall have ever evolved. And there you have a difficult question. Is it better for us to relinquish our existence for the sake of a civilization that might have continued, or to preserve a greater one that actually existsnow?"
Before they could bring much concentration to bear upon this weighty problem, a new situation diverted their attention. Inasmuch as the three of them were standing by the transparent wall of the citadel and facing shoreward, they could not help seeing the small industrial city that suddenly sprang into being there. Again, up on the hill, was a great black rocket, its nose pointing toward the threatening sky.
But this was not New Bretania. Nor was it Texania. Nor was there the slightest evidence of any type of conflict or preparations for defense, except in the design of the rocket, itself.
"That's a different alternate!" said Henry, instantly. "The city is different—more heavily industrialized. See the steel mills? It's even futuristic. Those insulator towers and antenna, for some kind of power transmission—"
"And that rocket is different—more efficient looking," observed Martia. "It seems to carry armament. You can see the firing cupolas."
"You're both very calm about it," said Kimnar. "Somebody has found the Chronotron. Come on!"
A moment after they had stepped through the teleporter, leaving the island citadel deserted, the hyper-space receiver began to react to signals. Lights flickered rapidly for several minutes. Then a human voice boomed into the empty dome. It spoke in a strange language, rapidly, urgently. But there was no operator there to reply....
When Kimnar, Henry and Martia stepped through the teleporter, they arrived in the circular room they had first visited in the subterranean world of Xlarn.
"There's somebody down here," said Henry.
"They're in that room with the vision screens," added Martia.
Kimnar frowned. "You're right, and I sense that one of them is Weston. Let's have a closer look!"
But already, it seemed, detectors had discovered their presence. In three seconds they heard running footsteps and they saw the tell-tale progression of light advancing toward them along the curved passageway.
Two men came into view, to be followed by a man on crutches who shouldered his way in between them.
"Weston!" exclaimed Martia.
"Dr. Edwards!" Henry cried out. Edwards was the man with the gun—the same gun that Kimnar had used against Mlargn.
The other member of the trio was the Indian Prince, his precious turban now much disheveled and awry.
"Aha!" cried Weston, grinning and leaning on his crutches with a derisive air. "So the wanderers have returned!"
The Indian Prince ran forward and kneeled before Henry, wringing his hands in supplication. In his fat, brown face and his wide, brown eyes was registered an expression of terror and desperation.
"Henry!" he exclaimed. "Only you can give me the answer—it is all so mixed up that I cannot understand. Only you can tell me if it's true!"
"Ifwhatis true?" asked Kimnar.
"Shut up, Mohammed!" yelled Weston. "Edwards knows what he's doing! Tell them, Edwards!—before you plug 'em!"
Since Edwards held the gun, he took time to explain. In his eyes was a wild sort of triumph.
"I don't know where you three have been," he said, "but in your absence a great deal has happened. Since young Henry, here, has always exhibited his great intelligence so willingly, perhaps he would corroborate my own deductions—by doing some fast extrapolating!" He said this last word through his teeth. There was a smile on his lips, but not in his dark and wearied eyes.
As he went on rapidly with his story, his three listeners were scanning his mind for the rest of it, putting the whole picture together even before he had finished.
When Weston killed Mlargn, he managed to manipulate controls that finally released all the others from their mental paralysis. He made Lady Dewitt and the Texans show him the location of the Chronotron, and under directions from the various scientists at his command a series of experiments was conducted. Various power settings were utilized, and test groups volunteered or were assigned to be sent back through time. Some, they knew, might arrive in a place where conditions would not be suitable for life. Others might perish in a world populated by carnivorous monsters, or they might freeze, or drown in shoreless oceans. But most of them seemed willing to risk it.
It was Uncle Andy's group that produced the alternate time that the three had witnessed from the citadel. This group had consisted of Andy, Dr. Bauml, Dr. Singer, Valerie Roagland, Peggy Hollenbeck, and several other men and women. Pee Bee, it developed, had been in the first "group," which had consisted only of himself—as he had apparently been in a suicidal mood and was desirous of giving the dice a roll for double or nothing.
Andy's group, it appeared, had only been thrown back about a thousand years, because the "civilization" they founded was small and still dedicated to the same goals which had been in the minds of the basic group when they entered the Chronotron. These descendants remembered their ancestors and carried some of their theories to the point of physical application.
In the meantime, only Weston, Edwards and the Prince remained below. The alternate time civilization, which referred to itself as "Little America," had appropriated the Xlarnan underworld facilities for itself, and the three observers had found it necessary to conceal themselves. To their dismay, the "Little Americans" had destroyed the Chronotron in order to make certain that none of their group would ever be tempted to snuff them out with a superimposed alternate.
Far from abandoning the idea of returning to the world and time of their ancestors' origin they had concentrated on time-travel theories of their own, with the intention of evolving a more accurate method so that they could be sure of where they were going.
"You said something to me and your Uncle Andy on board the plane before all this happened," Edwards remarked to Henry. "Something about novae and super fast light rays being thrown along the Fourth Coordinate. That must have started them on the road to their present discoveries and development, because there's a ship out there now that only uses rockets for take-off and navigational purposes. Once out in deep space it is supposed to operate on Cosmic energy, or so we have heard. It will go out faster than light. The idea is that when that happens it will be rotated out of three dimensional space and be forced to expend its extra velocity along the Fourth Coordinate, emerging in another time when it again slows down to the speed of light. But this isn't all. These scientists have worked out some new kind of mathematics and seem convinced they have been able to determine the direction and the rates of acceleration and deceleration necessary to deliver them into any given era of time, past or future. And their flight equation calls for the time we came from. Of course, they'll not hit it in the first attempt, but all subsequent time-jumps will be like vernier adjustments, focussing them down into the twentieth century—even that specific part of it they're aiming for."
"You can't let them do it!" exclaimed Kimnar. Weston, Edwards and the Prince stared at him in mild astonishment.
"I don't know what your objections may be, Scarface," said Edwards, "but as a matter of fact wedon'tintend to let them get away with it!"
Weston grinned sadistically, his gold-capped teeth glistening. "You see—weare going instead! Of course we'll cop their pilot, and he'll do what we tell him. And here's another little point. I'm not so sharp with the science, so Edwards will tell you that, too. Tell them about Africa, Doc!"
The three listeners tensed. They saw it coming. The "Little Americans" were well aware of Andy's connection with the D-C bomb. Andy, too, had been able to deduce, largely from the lack of ocean tides in this world of Xlarn, that it could have been the bomb that had brought the world of Xlarn into being by the destruction of the moon. The most sacred admonishment to his descendants in alternate time had been to find a way of getting back to the twentieth century and prevent the bomb from being launched. That single act would enable the original Earth civilization to continue, and Xlarn would cease to exist.
"It's all a nice, neat package," said Weston, "because don't forget I worked that French Morocco project, too, and I know how to sabotage that damned rocket! Then to make the whole story turn out real pretty with a happy ending, we have Mohammed here to pay off like he said, for getting him back home!"
The Prince still looked at Henry, his turban almost down over his eyes. "You have heard!" he cried out. "Tell me, Henry! Can it be done?"
"There's just one little technicality," said Henry. "How do you propose to capture that Cosmic drive rocket outside?"
Weston grinned again, and Dr. Edwards explained. "Our friends upstairs never suspected our existence. They probably assumed we got lost somewhere in the Chronotron. Having had no one to defend themselves against, they have produced no weapons of any description, with the exception of those they have installed on the rocket, for use when they get back to the twentieth century, if necessary, to force the issue concerning the D-C bomb. So they are quite vulnerable to a surprise attack. This gun should do the trick easily enough. It is fully loaded."
"What of their superior numbers?" asked Kimnar. But he read the answer before it was voiced.
"The poor devils were quite aware of the reaction sphere," Edwards answered. "There isn't much time left, you know. They chose their pilgrims, and the rest—"
Martia paled. "All dead!" she exclaimed.
Edwards shrugged. "Euthanasia. Tragic, perhaps, but very convenient. We only have six men to contend with."
"I don't want to appear too forward about all this," said Kimnar, slipping back into the sarcastic dialect of Scarface, "but we'd like to ride in that star buggy, ourselves. Maybe you can use another hand in your surprise attack?"
Henry and Martia looked at him quizzically, then their brows furrowed in deeper puzzlement as they read the weighty thing that was in his mind.
"To hell with you," yelled Weston. "I owe you something for that lousy deal you gave me on the rock. On second thought, maybe a bullet would be too easy. Maybe you should wait and see the sky blow up. You and the kids wouldn't want to miss all the pretty fireworks, now would you?"
The Prince sprang into action. Swiftly, he took up a position in front of Henry, Martia and Kimnar. Trembling, and with arms outspread, he cried out, "If you leave them, you can leave me, too! Shoot me—anything! But Henry and his friends are sacred! They go, or I stay!"
Dr. Edwards grimaced, looked at his gun, then at Weston. The latter glowered at the Prince, menacingly.
Finally, he muttered an oath that made Martia's face turn crimson. And he added, "What's the difference! We'll take you as excess baggage, but on condition you'll follow orders. Edwards here is going to be awful nervous on that trigger, so don't try anything."
The surface world was very warm and the sky was sickeningly bright. Vegetation drooped, dried up, dead or dying, and the plant stench of rot was in the degenerating air. In the mind of every sweating human left on Xlarn was one thought:
It can happen any second now....
Driven by the deadly threat of the sky, Weston and Edwards did not waste time on strategy. They approached the rocket base directly, out in the open, in the glaring light. The pilot and one other man was inside. Four others met them, in mild astonishment, but there was very little time for conversation.
When Weston let them know his intention, and when they looked at Dr. Edwards' gun, they smiled, resignedly.
"What is life or death to us now?" said the spokesman, a somewhat older man than the others. "The main consideration is our common purpose. You, too, want to stop thebomb. And if Doctor Edwards here is, as you say, a prominent authority known to that time, his influence would be greater than ours. As long as you intend to take Kennedy, the pilot, our efforts and sacrifices shall not have been in vain. Go—before it is too late!"
Once at the ladder Weston threw the crutches away and practically pulled himself up to the airlock with his powerful arms. Edwards followed close behind with his gun, and then came Martia, Henry and Kimnar, who gave the Prince a helping hand as he climbed.
The four on the ground watched silently for five minutes.
Then they saw their colleague, Mark Thixton, climb down out of the rocket. That left Kennedy alone—with those others.
Thixton walked over to his waiting friends. "Seven of them," he said. "The two youngsters will have to share an acceleration sling together." After a long moment he added, "Pray God they make it in time!"
The others said nothing. They only hoped Kennedy would take off fast enough to get through that raving pile in the sky. The radiation insulation was excellent in that ship, but they still wondered if escape would be possible.
It can happen any second now....
When Martia pulled out of the blackness that she had fallen into during acceleration, she began to cry. Henry could read the thought in her mind. Those brave, kind men back there—left to die.
Then came a disturbing thought from Kimnar who lay in the sling above them:You realize that we are through the reaction sphere. If they succeed in their purpose, you and I cease to exist. But what really matters is Galactic Civilization! That, too, will evaporate and be non-existent!
Henry and Martia were too weak to think back at him. But they thought to themselves. Earth, as they had known it, with its teeming billions of people and its cities and sciences and cultures.
And its wars and nationalisms and ideologies and greed and corruption!—interposed Kimnar's thought, vehemently.
But its beaches under the blue skies and a real, normal sun, with the children bathing and laughing, and its theatres and arts, its churches and universities and—Paris! Think of Paris! If they could stop the bomb, all that would continue to be—
I can show you six thousand cities greater than Paris! And if you consider Earth, then think of solar systems—dozens of worlds greater than Earth—more advanced, benevolent, civilized, where men cannot lie and cheat because they know each other's hearts and minds! Weigh all that against one world!
No—thought Henry, at last.Consider Earth's own future expansion, if saved from cataclysm. Think of its own possibilities of reaching for the stars and also establishing a Galactic Civilization!
Kimnar did not respond.
Suddenly, Kennedy came out of his straps and yelled. He was looking out the great vision port, from which the radiation shielding had been removed. Everybody sat up and stared into outer space.
In the lower part of their field vision was the Great Ring that had once been the moon, and below it was the glowing reaction sphere that covered Xlarn. It looked like an incandescent Saturn, with the mighty star-walls of Infinity rising behind it. But even this tremendous spectacle was insignificant in its effect when compared with ten other prominent objects out there.
"Space ships!" shouted Weston. "Where the hell—"
Ten great spheres, with rods at top and bottom and thick rings around their "equators," as though they were space-flying gyroscopes. They were converging slowly upon the rocket.
"Shall I tell you what they are?" asked Kimnar enthusiastically. "They are in the hands of Fate!"
"If you know what they are, don't get corny, Scarface!" roared Weston, climbing out of his sling and grabbing the gun from Edwards. "Spill it!"
Calmly but swiftly, Kimnar told the story, and he explained the issue that hung in the balance—Earth's alternate future against this already existing Galactic Civilization.
"Here and now," he concluded, "Fate can decide. Perhaps it is not in our own hands, after all."
Dr. Edwards stared at him aghast, the whole explanation of Henry's and Martia's precociousness striking him at last. Then he looked again at the approaching spheres.
"Do they know what we represent?" he asked.
"Yes," smiled Kimnar. "I communicated the message to them some time ago. I thought I was lying to them then, or doing some wishful thinking, merely to make them come for us—but now it's no longer a lie. Youcanstop that moon bomb and strike a new alternate across a billion years of space and time! But if you do, I and my friends and a Galactic Civilization will cease to exist!"
All this time, the pilot, Kennedy, had been like a man coming out of anesthesia. He was a tall, gaunt young fellow with heavy, forward jutting brows and far seeing eyes. His long chin was way out as he watched everything and listened, with his wiry right hand lying inertly beside the simple bank of the ship's main controls.
"Kennedy!" yelled Weston. "What kind of guns are in those blisters?"
The pilot stared at him. "They fire one pound projectiles—nuclear bombs."
"Thatis for me! Come on, Edwards! To your station!" Before anyone could stop him, he was swinging lightly away, from support to support, under the gravity free condition of free fall.
"Better strap in tight!" called Kennedy, coming to life at last. "If I'm going to maneuver out here, you're going to feel some Gs!"
"Let's go!" they heard Weston reply, from his blister. And Edwards was already on his way to the other position.
Grimly, the pilot shifted into emergency flight position and strapped himself in, while Kimnar and Henry and Martia watched him. They heard the Indian Prince stuttering through his prayers again.
"Kennedy," said Kimnar, half rising in his sling. "Don't do it!"
"You better stay strapped," replied the other. Even as he spoke, a great weight pressed upon them and the firmament outside began to revolve, sweeping Xlarn and the star ships momentarily out of sight.
"Kennedy!" persisted Kimnar, doggedly, in spite of the mounting pressure "Think this over! One world—Earth—cannot be worth twelve civilized solar systems! Let me contact those star men for you! You could continue to live—"
Everybody came close to blacking out as the rocket swept down over the row of globular ships and shook with recoil from Weston's and Edward's firing. A horrifying scene of exploding spheres swept by the observation panels, and Martia screamed in her mixed despair. Kimnar sweated profusely. Henry tensed his mind, preparing to paralyze Kennedy. It was an irresistible impulse, not quite tied to logic.
No!—came Kimnar's thought to him.I have decided against that kind of coercion. There's something bigger out here than we. Call it Fate, if you will. And that power alone will have to decide! We can only propose!
It was in that moment that Fate cut the cord. An eye-searing light filled the cabin, and Kennedy shrieked—"The reaction sphere!"
The planet once known as Earth burst into a minor nova, blasting its Great Ring into spiraling shreds and tatters of celestial tinsel. In the face of that swiftly advancing flame, the star ships that had survived the rocket's first onslaught flicked safely into hyper-space, and Kennedytriedto stand enough Gs of acceleration to keep ahead of it. He barely made it.
But Weston and Edwards did not. At first they were blinded, utterly, by the blast, unprotected as they were in the blisters. Then, as a very small fraction of that searing wave licked out at the rocket, the hull resisted but the blisters fused and exploded. An airlock sealed the gun compartments off from the rocket's cabin, but the remains of the two gunners drifted into the turbulent ether.
There was one other decisive effect of the holocaust. Certain delicate apparatus connected with the collection and storing of Cosmic energy was also fused and made useless, before it had hardly begun to store up for the intended work ahead.
"That does it!" panted Kennedy. "We're licked!"
"No we're not," said Kimnar, nodding toward the observation panel. His tear-flooded eyes were struggling out of the momentarily induced blindness and he saw that the rocket had turned so that the glare of the explosion was not visible.
Instead, there was the towering, eternal firmament, and in it had suddenly materialized one of the star man spheres, glistening brightly in the light that their eyes were now being spared. Kennedy watched it helplessly as it approached.
Henry and Martia became aware of minds probing them gingerly and communing with Kimnar—minds of the star men, who had not struck back immediately because they had been hoping to rescue some of their own kind and take them home....
While a bewildered but grateful man named Kennedy and a wide-eyed Indian Prince followed Kimnar, Henry and Martia into a scintillating civilization in far off space and time, a secret rocket experiment was being concluded in French Morocco. In the nose of the rocket was a D-C bomb, which was to be detonated on the surface of the moon.
No one who had entered the Chronotron, at Weston's insistence, had succeeded in reaching the twentieth century and altering the future by a hair. But Pee Bee had shot far behind the line, landing somewhere in the 8th century B.C. No change in original Cause can ever fail to precipitate an equal degree of change in final Effect. Yet the world that existed between the 8th century B.C. and the twentieth century A.D. was not greatly shaken by having a few lines of print changed here and there in various histories, reference books and encyclopedias. It seemed that there never had been such a word as billiards. There was an ancient game known as pool (Egypt.—puul), the origin of which was not England, but in the glorious imperial days of Ethiopia, when Egypt was one of its provinces and a famous emperor referred to later by Roman historians as Pibeus, invented it to amuse his harem of two hundred wives....