"Pious old fraud," said McEldownie, "you love it, but you won't admit it to yourselves. It was we rebels who were the honest ones."
The leader ignored him. "I was about to tell you—"
Mac said aloud, so that the leader's thought waves were garbled, "I could hate you two for running amok alongside these sniveling so-and-sos. You helped kill scores of my companions. You couldn't have been that sure we were wrong, could you? Damn it, I loved those boys. I lived with them for a dozen of your match-spark lifetimes."
"If you speak out of turn again, I shall have you taken into the leaded room of my disk, where your thoughts and words will be confined to yourself. I was about to tell you of our history," the leader thought, looking at Alan's group. "Long, long ago, so long that even we, who live a thousand years, cannot comprehend what a vast reach of time it was, we lived on a planet very like your own. The atmosphere must have been exactly, or nearly exactly, like that of Earth; for you and I have the same lungs, the same organs, and only differ fundamentally in the texture of our skins and the flexibility of our skeletons and muscles.
"Then, for a reason we do not know except by vague and undependable myth, our ancestors left that planet and went out into space. They were already superbly advanced scientists, though they did not have the rays later developed, which gave us our extended life span. They built disks and journeyed out into the star systems, and eventually found a planet that could support their life in the way the mother planet had done. There they settled. The old charts and logs and histories are long since lost, and this is known only by legend and tradition."
"What does legend say sent them away from the first planet?" asked Rob Pope.
"Several things. Terrible wars, the rise of inimical civilizations which would have had to be obliterated to insure peace, which our ancestors did not wish to do—" bovine feces, muttered Mac rudely—"and the sinking of their homeland into the sea."
"Good grief," said Win, opening her eyes wide, "could that have been Atlantis? Here on Earth?"
"The time wouldn't seem to be right," said Bill, "but heaven only knows, it sounds like it."
The leader groped in their minds. "You have a legend of just such a nation here, on this planet," he thought excitedly. "We must investigate it. This may be our home." He chuckled aloud. "Don't worry, we wouldn't come back and settle in with you. We are too happy on our own world. But it would be wonderfully satisfying to know the truth of our beginnings!"