"A minute, my friends," Zor Ala cautioned in his queer, blurred English. "These people are come from the year 2062. They were captured during a passage through the ancient Earth-Tube by the Kralons' Time Net, just as you were dragged from your own various Ages for the Kralons' selfish plans."
In the bewildering hours that followed, the Vator companions learned the answers to some of their enigmatic experiences. But they learned also of strange and horrible things which even the more advanced of the queer colony did not understand.
III
Among their new acquaintances was a stocky, pop-eyed physicist with a fringe of hair like stiff iron wire, who introduced himself as Gordo Lanson. In the year 2076 he had been experimenting with a new super-cyclotron and inadvertently had been caught in the almost inconceivably strong magnetic field used for the acceleration of electrons in the vast atom smasher.
He had felt a moment of intense vertigo, a wrenching, dimensional sort of straining of every cell, then he, like the Vator passengers, had found himself suspended in the huge net.
There were also a dozen orientals, some from Hiroshima and some from Nagasaki. They had been here since the days of the atomic blasts.
Then there was a thin, dark-skinned chap with strange eyes. He had been flashing through space on an exploratory trip to Jupiter, when suddenly his ship had spun into an etheric vortex, one of those enigmatic whirlpools of magnetic flux which were so deadly to space travel. He, Dar Mikol, had been torn from 3122, the year of the great space war between Earth-colonized Mars and its parent planet.
There was a Russian peasant who had been plowing his field in 1688 when a lightning bolt split the lowering skies and threw him through time and space to land in the Kralons' net.
There were also fifteen other people from Randall's own time; the missing Vator passengers of prior trips.