"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!" * * * * * Alan felt himself becoming intellectually agog over this matter, and resolutely drew away from it. "Please," he said, "your history." "Certainly. On the new planet, which we call Tlonis, our race set up a civilization that has endured for many millennia. Our ancestors found no intelligent race on that world, by the way, but only low forms of animal life. The flora is analogous to your own in many ways, as is natural when two planets are so alike.