"Maybe it's the original home planet our ancestors left, and maybe it isn't. I've mucked around with that Atlantis theory too. The names are similar—Atlantis, Tlonis. It isn't important.
"We landed in the late years of your eighteenth century. Our disks were seen and you can still find records of the sightings in the books and periodicals of that time, and of later times when our lads took the ships out of hiding for practice flights. I never practiced because it's only in the last forty years my crippling wounds have been really healed.
"We more or less took you over. It was reprehensible from your point of view. Don't hate me for it. We had to make you advance a thousand years' worth in two hundred. We wanted to go back to Tlonis and—not conquer it, but make a place for our kind of thinking so we could live there. It's home, after all. We needed disks and an army.
"Sure, we kept you in a stew, worked up, always at war, and so on. It was the only way. You'd always warred before, anyway. Only in times of war could we advance your knowledge of science and make its rapidity seem logical. So we controlled governments and laboratories and brains. If we hadn't, you'd still be in the gunpowder stage, instead of the jet and electronic stage. We aren't all bad. We aren't pure black. We hurt you but as little as we could. We used you as you used to use oxen and horses; but like you loved horses—which often got killed in war, mind you—we loved you."
"Stop apologizing, Mac. We understand your point of view," said Alan. "But we understand this man's, too."
"Sure, sure. Everybody has a right to his own opinion, even if it's a stuffy one.
"Anyhow, in the early '40s we gave you the atom bomb, nuclear fission, that is. And the radiations of those first bombs went out across the great spaces, and twelve years later were detected and analyzed on Tlonis by the astronomers. Uncle's bunch got in an uproar, as we'd known they would, and piled into ships and started out for Earth. We couldn't help that; we'd had to give you fission. We figured we had enough time. We started disk construction and we began to build an invincible army out of your men, by raying them with the painkilling and telepathic rays. We miscalculated the time it would take Uncle to get here. We wanted to meet him in space or bypass him and get to Tlonis with our gang. Maybe, we thought, he wouldn't have connected the atomic explosion with us, anyhow. But he did, and knew we were preparing to invade Tlonis, and he came.
"His scouting ships reached Earth a few months ago, reported back to the main fleet, and down he came, to blunder and take things for granted and make too-hasty decisions, as always; and he murdered more people through hastiness than we ever would have in our scheme of things."
The leader thought bitterly, "I admit the justice of that. I have said we are more sorry than we can tell." He gestured at Alan. "Consider this as you weigh what my nephew has said. There is a false sense of kinship between you because of the mutual language. He talks while I must telepath my thoughts to you. Discount that when you judge us, please."