"Now it comes back," said Uncle Andy. "They had gone out to look for springwater and had not returned."
"To make a long story short," said Henry, "there were two separate groups. First, the English group, consisting of Lady Dewitt, Cyril Rollins, the Crispin sisters, the two mothers who lost their babies, and Mr. Langham. The second group consisted of Mania's governess, Emily, three WAACs, and the three Texas GIs.
"Now as I see it, here's what happened. The first group found the time machine and entered it, possibly without knowing what they were doing. They were transported back in time perhaps several thousands of years. Stranded there and with no other recourse but to survive, they set up their own type of colony, and their descendants established the Empire of New Bretania."
Peggy looked at Valerie, and both found a common conviction in their eyes. They were sadly understanding and patient as they looked back at Henry and Martia. Uncle Andy only refilled his pipe with the last of his tobacco and watched Henry intently.
"Now wait a minute!" put in Martia. "Henry's not as crazy as you think! Let him continue!"
"We're listening," replied Uncle Andy.
"Having benefitted by some knowledge of modern technology on the part of their original ancestors, this race soon attained a degree of civilization equivalent to our own, though with fewer numbers. Their science enabled them to detect the unbalanced nature of the ionosphere, so they knew they had to get off the planet in order to survive. By some means unknown to us, they were able to make observations through the ionosphere and detect livable conditions on Venus, after all. In other words, after a billion years beyond our time, Venus must have had sufficient time to build up an atmosphere containing a life-sustaining percentage of oxygen. This discovery spurred the building of their space ark, which was to take a representative number of their kind to the new world.
"Now in the meantime let's go back to the second group that was lost—Emily, the WAACs and the Texans. They, too, went through the time machine and built up a civilization contemporaneous with that of New Bretania. Hence the origin of the country, Texania. These latter people were trying to get the ark of space from the New Bretanians.
"Don't you see how it all fits in? When those two groups went through the time machine, we found ourselves in an alternate time, a world changed by their effects on two or three thousand years of the immediate past."
"Then how did everything get back to where it was originally?" asked Uncle Andy. "What got rid of that alternate time so abruptly?"