They drank; lightly and intermittently at first, then deeply.
At last Seaton put down the pitcher. "That isn't enough, by any means; but we're damp enough inside so that we can swallow food, I guess. While you're finding out where we are, Mart, Peg and I'll eat six or eight meals apiece."
While Seaton and Margaret ate—ate as they had drunk, carefully, but with every evidence of an insatiable bodily demand for food—Dorothy's puzzled gaze went from the worn faces of the diners to a mirror which reflected her own vivid, unchanged self.
"But I don't understand it at all, Dick!" she burst out at last. "I'm not thirsty, nor hungry, and I haven't changed a bit. Neither has Martin; and yet you two have lost pounds and pounds and look as though you had been pulled through a knot hole. It didn't seem to us as though you were away from us all. You were going to tell me about that back there, when we were interrupted. Now go ahead and explain things, before I explode. What happened, anyway?"
Seaton, hunger temporarily assuaged, gave a full but concise summary of everything that had happened while he and Margaret were away from the Skylark. He then launched into a scientific dissertation, only to be interrupted by Dorothy.
"But, Dick, it doesn't sound reasonable that all that could possibly have happened to you and Peggy without our even knowing that any time at all had passed!" she expostulated. "We weren't unconscious or anything, were we, Martin? We knew what was going on all the time, didn't we?"
"We were at no time unconscious, and we knew at all times what was taking place around us," Crane made surprising but positive answer. He was seated at a visiplate, but had been listening to the story instead of studying the almost-sheer emptiness that was space. "And since it is a truism of Norlaminian psychology that any lapse of consciousness, of however short duration, is impressed upon the consciousness of a mind of even moderate power, I feel safe in saying that for Dorothy and me, at least, no lapse of time did occur or could have occurred."
"There!" Dorothy exulted. "You've got to admit that Martin knows his stuff. How are you going to get around that?"
"Search me—wish I knew." Seaton frowned in thought. "But Mart chirped it, I think, when he said 'for Dorothy and me, at least,' because for us two time certainly lapsed, and lapsed plenty. However, Mart certainly does know his stuff; the old think tank is full of bubbles all the time. He doesn't make positive statements very often, and when he does you can sink the bank roll on 'em. Therefore, since you were both conscious and time did not lapse—for you—it must have been time itself that was cuckoo instead of you. It must have stretched, or must have been stretched, like the very dickens—for you.