Walter was studying her as she talked. She was tall, fully as tall as he, and well-proportioned. She looked to be somewhere in her early thirties, about the age Martha had been. She had the same calm confidence about her that he’d always liked about Martha, even though it had contrasted with his own easygoing informality. In fact, he thought she looked quite a bit like Martha.
“I think I know why they brought you here but let’s go back a bit,” he said. “Do you know just what has happened otherwise?”
“You mean that they’ve killed everyone?”
“Yes. Please sit down. You know how they accomplished it?” She sank into a comfortable chair nearby.
“No,” she said, “I don’t know just how. Not that it matters does it?”
“Not a lot. But here’s the story—what I know of it from getting one of them to talk, and from piecing things together. There isn’t a great number of them—here, anyway. I don’t know how numerous a race they are where they came from and I don’t know where that is, but I’d guess it’s outside the Solar System. You’ve seen the space ship they came in?”
“Yes It’s as big as a mountain.”
“Almost. Well it has equipment for emitting some sort of a vibration—they call it that, in our language, but I imagine it’s more like a radio wave than a sound vibration—that destroys all animal life. It— the ship itself—is insulated against the vibration. I don’t know whether its range is big enough to kill off the whole planet at once, or whether they flew in circles around the earth, sending out the vibratory waves. But it killed everybody and everything instantly and, I hope, painlessly. The only reason we, and the other two-hundred-odd animals in this zoo, weren’t killed was because we were inside the ship. We’d been picked up as specimens. You do know this is a zoo, don’t you?”
“I—I suspected it.”
“The front walls are transparent from the outside The Zan were pretty clever at fixing up the inside of each cubicle to match the natural habitat of the creature it contains. These cubicles, such as the one we’re in, are of plastic, and they’ve got a machine that makes one in about ten minutes, If Earth had had a machine and a process like that, there wouldn’t have been any housing shortage. Well, there isn’t any housing shortage now, anyway. And I imagine that the human race—specifically you and I—can stop worrying about the A-bomb and the next war. The Zan certainly solved a lot of problems for us.”