We had tried to question him when first he could talk. But he avoided telling us anything we wanted to know, save that once, at Dr. Weatherby’s insistence, he assured us that our vehicle was safe. And that the small fragment of rock beneath the microscope—that tiny gray speck which held our universes, our earth—was under guard so that no harm could come to it.
This was a city, the capital, the head city of a nation. Its people had lived here on this globe since the dawn of their history, ascended from the beasts which even now roamed the air, the caves, forests, and the sea.
Ren smiled at us. “You too,” he said. “I can realize you are of an origin the same.”
He did indeed think we were of a human type very primitive. The men of science who had seen us coming out of infinite smallness beneath their microscope, had remarked on it.
The small protuberance in the corner of our eyes, the remains of the beasts’ third eyelid, the shape of our heads, our almost pointed ears—I noticed that his own were very nearly circular—our harsh voices, our thick, stocky, muscular bodies were indications that they remarked on.
We discussed it. But Jim interrupted. “How did your men of science know that we were coming out of that piece of gray rock?”
It had been partly by chance. The fragment of rock had been a portion of the interior wall of a room wherein scientific experiments were being made. Ren used our words, “Experiments in physics and chemistry.”
One of the scientists had found himself receiving strange thought-waves. Ren described them. They were Dolores’ thoughts. The scientist traced them with measuring instruments to the wall of the room, but could be no more exact than that.
Then, later, from a tiny protuberance of the wall, a glow was observed. It proved to be a sudden radio-activity; this protuberance of gray stone had become radiant. Electrons were streaming off from it. The scientists chipped it off the huge block of stone of which it was so small a part, and put it under a microscope. It was violently radio-active. And from it they observed a stream of red.
“Our Beta ray,” Dr. Weatherby exclaimed. “Our voyage, the disturbance we set up made the substance give off its electrons.”