Quickly they came to the little clearing in the forest where Kim Idim's metal house glinted vaguely. They pitched hastily from the saddles of the panting horses.
"It is nearly morning!" Kim Idim declared. "And we must carry the projector out onto the plain—there is not room in this forest for the hosts I shall draw from the past."
"First I'm gittin' back into decent clothes," muttered Hank Martin. I feel naked in this durned armor."
He and Lopez and the Viking scrambled back into their proper clothing, and then followed Ethan and Ptah and the old scientist into the little house. With Kim Idim directing, the five comrades bent and lifted the massive time-ray projector.
The mechanism was appallingly heavy. Without the great strength of Swain, they could not have carried it. Straining every muscle, they bore the thing out of the house and through the forest. Kim Idim followed with the horses.
Dawn was paling the heavens as they emerged onto the great plain. At the old scientist's direction, they carried the projector to the summit of a small bare hillock. There they set it down.
"Look!" cried Ptah suddenly, pointing westward across the plain. "The Luunians come!"
Two miles away, a dark mass was approaching.
"A big bunch of mounted warriors," muttered Hank Martin. "We can't hold off a crowd like that, out here in the open."
"Hurry, Kim Idim!" Ethan exclaimed tautly. "It's now or never for your scheme."
Kim Idim was already working with frantic speed, twisting the amazingly intricate controls of his great creation, setting the dials that directed the time-ray along the mysterious time-dimension and in space. The old scientist peered tensely, as he worked, into the glass screen in the projector's face.
A picture, a living picture, suddenly appeared in the screen, a vista of a green coast and a blue sea, with a small city of marble and brick buildings on the shore; dignified men in togas, slaves in leather tunics, a few soldiers in crested helmet and armor, walked in its cobbled streets. In the screen, they saw this living scene as though from high above.
"That's a city of the Roman empire!" Ethan cried. "But there are only a few fighting-men there."
"I shall have to find their warriors," Kim Idim panted. He slowly turned a knob.
The stylus touching the world-globe atop the projector moved imperceptibly in answer. The scene in the glass screen shifted swiftly, over the countryside of that imperial Roman province of more than two million years before.
"The Luunians are near!" warned Lopez, and Ethan heard the rasp of the Spaniard's sword as he drew.
"Looks like we're due for a scrap," Hank Martin drawled in agreement, calmly reloading his long rifle.
Ethan saw that the Luunians numbered about two hundred mounted men, led by a half-dozen of the red Masters. They were now less than a mile away, riding steadily forward.
"I have it!" Kim Idim cried excitedly.
Ethan spun back to the projector. In the screen, he looked down on a stone road, and a marching body of some four thousand armored men, winding like a great metal snake along that Roman highway of long ago.
"A Roman legion on the march!"
