“But two weeks ago—two weeks of these peculiarly prolonged days, not to mention the similarly protracted nights,” put in Peter Vanderbilt, “two weeks ago, we began to believe differently.”
“Why?” asked Tony.
“Airplane,” replied Vanderbilt succinctly.
“Where?”
“Where would it be?”
“I mean,” said Tony, “it didn’t land?”
“Not it. Nor too plainly appear.”
“Neither did ours,” said Tony.
“You mean you sent it? It was your machine?” Ransdell swiftly demanded.
“Not two weeks ago,” Tony denied. “We had nothing in the air then. I mean, an airplane visited us too; and it didn’t too plainly appear.”
“But you saw it?”
“We got a glimpse of it— a glint of light on a wing through the clouds,” explained Tony. “Did you see more here?”
“Yes,” said Ransdell. “We got a shape—a silhouette. Queer type; we couldn’t identify it. Long, back-pointing wings. Like larks’ wings, somebody said. It looked like a giant lark in the sky.”
Tony looked up from Ransdell to Eliot James, who had joined the circle.
Eliot softly whistled.
“Well,” said Tony to Eliot.
“Well yourself!” Eliot James retorted. “You say it.”
“Say what?” demanded Ransdell impatiently. “You know whose plane it was? What party brought that type over?”
“No party,” said Tony bluntly.
“What do you mean?”
“What I say. No party from earth brought that ship with them. It wasn’t brought over.”
He had gone a little pale, as he spoke; and he wiped his forehead and then his hands with his handkerchief.
“What—the—hell!” whispered Jack Taylor with awed deliberation.
“I said,” iterated Tony solemnly, “it wasn’t brought over. On the edge of the city of the Other People, of which we’ve been telling you—under the great glass dome, but near an edge where they could be run out, easily—was a sort of hangar of those things. We saw a—a hundred of them. Like larks, they’d look in the sky—all-metal larks of marvelous design. They had engines. Did you tell them of the engine in that car we found wrecked before we went off to find the city?” He appealed to Eliot James.
Eliot nodded; and several voices urged Tony on with: “Yes; he told us.… We know.”
“Well,” said Tony, “they had engines of that same small, powerful type. We recognized it; but we couldn’t get one going. We tried to.”
He stopped, wet his lips.
“Go on! For God’s sake, go on!”
“All right,” said Tony. “But where do I go from there? What am I to tell you? I can tell you this; for I know it. I saw it. I saw the machines; and I felt them with my hands; and as I told you, I tried to make the engine work, but Eliot and I couldn’t.”
“The Other People—the People a Million Years Dead—the inhabitants of Bronson Beta—had aircraft that would look, in the air, like nothing we had on earth but a lark. They had small, economical and evidently exceedingly powerful engines that propelled them by a motive-power we haven’t learned to employ.”