"Nonsense," said Steve, "you just finished telling us about your airships, and boats and marvelous inventions—"
"You don't understand," said their tiny guest patiently. "There was no physical hardship involved. We had no trouble flying over the continent, or approaching it from the ocean. But the moment we tried to land, from the sea or air, disaster overtook us."
"What sort of disaster?" asked Myra.
"Insanity."
Every so often, it seemed, the Siykulans sent an expedition to their neighboring continent. And once in a while—not so often—a member or two of the expedition would return, to babble crazily of monsters and blackness and throbbings in their heads.
They had lost some of their best minds that way before they gave up. Except for one further experiment. They outfitted a remote control ship with an assortment of animals and sent this to the neighboring continent, accompanied by a ship manned by a higher-order Siykulan who directed the animal craft without himself going close enough to the other continent to be affected.
The animal ship was landed while the controlling vessel hovered high above to note reactions. After a time, the first ship took off and the two sped back to Siykul.
Tests previously conducted had proven that animals could be made insane by inaudible notes of music and by scientifically-induced frustration. But these animals had not been affected by their exposure to whatever it was that had driven their more intelligent neighbors into idiocy.
It was therefore assumed that the malignant aura which hung over the green continent could affect only the brainy, possibly because the aura was electrical in nature and in some way short-circuited the brain through thought, which is another form of electricity.