parallel western system. And a
year later that had been put into Project Folsom One. Again Ashe,
Murdock, and a newcomer, the Apache Travis Fox, had gone back into time
to the Arizona of the Folsom hunters, discovering what they wanted--two
ships, one wrecked, the other intact. And when the full efforts of the
project had been centered on bringing the intact ship back into the
present, chance had triggered controls set by the dead alien commander.
A party of four, Ashe, Murdock, Fox, and a technician, had then made an
involuntary voyage into space, touching three worlds on which the
galactic civilization of the far past was now marked only by ruins.

Voyage tape fed into the controls of the ship had taken the men, and,
when rewound, had--by a miracle--returned them to Terra with a cargo of
similar tapes found in a building on a world which might have been the
central capital for a government comprised not of countries or of worlds
but of solar systems. Tapes--each one the key to another planet.

And that ancient galactic knowledge was treasure such as the Terrans had
never dreamed of possessing, though there were the attendant fears that
such discoveries could be weapons in enemy hands. There had been an
enforced sharing with other nations of tapes chosen at random at a great
drawing. And each nation secretly remained convinced that, in spite of
the untold riches it might hold as a result of chance, its rivals had
done better. Right at this moment, Ashe did not in the least doubt,
there were agents of his own party intent on accomplishing at the Red
project just what Camdon had done there. However, that did not help in
solving their present dilemma concerning Operation Cochise, one part of
their project, but perhaps the most important now.

Some of the tapes were duds, either too damaged to be useful, or set for
worlds hostile to Terrans lacking the equipment the earlier
star-traveling race had had at its command. Of the five tapes they now
knew had been snooped, three would be useless to the enemy.

But one of the remaining two.... Ashe frowned. One was the goal toward
which they had been working feverishly for a full twelve months. To
plant a colony across the gulf of space--a successful colony--later to
be used as a steppingstone to other worlds....

"So we have to move faster." Ruthven's comment reached Ashe through his
stream of memories.

"I thought you required at least three more months to conclude personn