"Have you not searched for the means to control the life principle--you people of Earth?" he asked. "We have it here. You see"--and he waved a hand toward the standing throng--"we are young to your eyes and the others who greeted you were the same." McGuire and the scientist exchanged glances of corroboration. "But your age," asked Sykes, "measured in years?" "We hardly measure life in years." Professor Sykes nodded slowly; his mind found difficulty in accepting so astounding a fact. "But our language?" he queried. "How is it that you can speak our tongue?" The tall man smiled and leaned forward to place a hand on a knee of each of the men beside him. "Why not," he asked, "when there doubtless is relationship between us. "You called the continent Atlantis. Perhaps its very existence is but a fable now: it has been many centuries since we have had instruments to record thought force from Earth, and we have lost touch. But, my friends, even then we of Venus had conquered space, and it was we who visited Atlantis to find a race more nearly like ourselves than were the barbarians who held the other parts of Earth. "I was there, but I returned. There were some who stayed and they were lost with the others in the terrible cataclysm that sank a whole continent beneath the waters. But some, we have believed, escaped." "Why have you not been back?" the flyer asked. "You could have helped us so much." "It was then that our own destruction came upon us. The same comet, perhaps, may have caused a change of stresses in your Earth and sunk the lost Atlantis. Ah! That was a beautiful land, but we have never seen it since. We have been--here. "But you will understand, now," he added, "that, with our insight into your minds, we have little difficulty in mastering your language." This talk of science and incredible history left Lieutenant McGuire cold. His mind could not wander long from its greatest concern. "But the earth!" he exclaimed. "What about the earth? This attack! Those devils mean real mischief!" "More than you know; more than you can realize, friend Mack Guire!" "Why?" demanded the flyer. "Why?" "Have your countries not reached out for other countries when land was needed?" asked the man, Djorn. "Land--land! Space in which to breed--that is the reason for the invasion. "This world has no such continents as yours. Here the globe is covered by the oceans; we have perhaps one hundredth of the land areas of your Earth And the red ones breed like flies. Life means nothing to them; they die like flies, too. But they need more room; they intend to find it on your world." * * * * * "A strange race," mused Professor Sykes. "They puzzled me. But--'less than human,' I think you said. Then how about their ships? How could they invent them?"