He looked away from their bewildered expressions. "Harlston and I made an advance exploration trip to the Hyades, all right. But we didn't find seven—or was it eight?—Earth-type worlds. We didn't even drop back into the continuum. Because we found evidence of bustling subspace travel and communications that indicated a vigorous culture of star-traveling Hyadeans!"
McAllister swore. Mortimer came forward, perplexed. "But—"
Randall motioned for silence. "Let him finish."
"We got the hell out of there," Stewart said, "without even having seen a Hyadean. We figured that if there was another intelligent race in this part of the galaxy, it might be a hostile one. And our worlds had to know about it. We couldn't chance being captured.
"So we started making subspace leaps back home. One of those jumps ended here—where we had dropped off the telepuppet barge on our way out. At long range, we had a look at that team. And there was an alien ship down there—maybe the same one that attacked us this morning. It could only mean that the Hyadeans were expanding into our sector of the galaxy."
Stewart paused and stared at the cave floor, still confused over what had made him forget all that. Then he went on, but only surmising the rest:
"Don't you see? That ship must have captured us—removed from our minds the fact that we had discovered their nest in the Hyades. That way, we would never suspect we were about to run into opposition in our expansion. We'd be caught off guard, while the Hyadeans would have time for arming!"
Again, he paused uncertainly. "They must have also planted the false impression that there were many Earth-type worlds in the Hyades—so they could pick us off, ship by ship, as—"
But Randall was shaking his head miserably.