The leader directed a thought at them. "You must realize that this man, my nephew, was not content to share his views with those who agreed with him. He forced an insurrection on a people who had been thoroughly happy. There was bloodshed in a race that had known none for generations. We overcame him and we might have executed him, but it was repugnant to us. So we gave him space disks and fuel and synthetic food machines and all else he would need, he and the men who had fought for him, and we exiled him to space. "We knew that somewhere there was a planet which could sustain life. He had a chance of finding it, a small chance, but a chance. As it happens, he did find it." "After three hundred years of the blackness of the void," said McEldownie. "It was the mercy of God we did. Otherwise we'd have lived out our lives in space. Do you see the cruelty that lurks in these people, which they won't recognize? Killing us would have been kind; but they sent us to wander among the galaxies." "You may tell them briefly what you did then," the leader ordered him. "Be quick, my time is nearly up." Mac stood up and walked back and forth, clinking his chained manacles. "We found Earth because our detectors told us the atmosphere was the same as that of our world. It was the only one of its kind we'd come across in all those centuries, centuries of sweeping through sun system after sun system. "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."