"You have the most stupendous imagination the world has ever seen—but there may be some slight basis of fact there, after all," said Crane, slowly.
"I'm convinced of it, for one reason in particular. Notice that it says specifically that the visitors stunned the natives. Now that thought is absolutely foreign to all Osnomian nature—when they strike they kill, and always have. Now if that myth has come down through so many generations without having that 'stunned' changed to 'killed', I'm willing to bet a few weeks of time that the rest of it came down fairly straight, too. Of course, what they had may not have been the zone of force as we know it, but it must have been a ray of some kind—and believe me, that was one educated ray. Somebody sure had something, even 'way back in those days. And if they had anything at all back there, they must know a lot by now. That's why I want to look 'em up."
"But suppose they want to kill us off at sight?" objected Dorothy. "They might be able to do it, mightn't they?"
"Sure, but they probably wouldn't want to—any more than you would step on an ant who asked you to help him move a twig. That's about how much ahead of us they probably are. Of course, we struck a pure mentality once, who came darn near dematerializing us entirely, but I'm betting that these folks haven't got that far along yet. By the way, I've got a hunch about those pure intellectuals."
"Oh, tell us about it!" laughed Margaret. "Your hunches are the world's greatest brainstorms!"
"Well, I pumped out and rejeweled the compass we put on that funny planet—as a last resort, I thought we might maybe visit them and ask that bozo we had the argument with to help us out. I think he—or it—would show us everything about the zone of force we want to know. I don't think that we'd be dematerialized, either, because the situation would give him something more to think about for another thousand cycles; and thinking seemed to be his main object in life. However, to get back to the subject, I found that even with the new power of the compass the entire planet was still out of reach. Unless they've dematerialized it, that means about ten billion light-years as an absolute minimum. Think about that for a minute!... I've just got a kind of a hunch that maybe they don't belong in this Galaxy at all—that they might be from some other Galaxy, planet and all; just riding around on it, as we are riding in the Skylark. Is the idea conceivable to a sane mind, or not?"
"Not!" decided Dorothy, promptly. "We'd better go to bed. One more such idea, in progression with the last two you've had, would certainly give you a compound fracture of the skull. 'Night, Cranes."
