He lay there unresisting. He had done his best, absolutely his damned best. Let it blow. Let it blow. After a while he looked at his glove watch. It was two minutes past the time for explosion. He had saved the _Elephant's Child_. He turned and looked across the plain and saw, beyond the great trap into which giant-smoke was settling, two figures come running toward him with unearthly strides. One of them halted and gathered Jerry into its arms. The other reached Pink and knelt beside him and hugged him tightly. Pink laughed, a passionate sound of relief. Circe said, "You made it, darling. You made it!" The air-lock began to open. CHAPTER XXIV The djinni on the floor said, "I concede this battle to you, Captain. I have seen the ending on the screen. But there are others out there, on Oasis and in the void. We'll win to Earth some day in spite of this victory." Pink, snugly ensconced in a foam-chair with his sprained ankle propped up, his surviving officers seated around him, and Circe on the arm of the deep chair, took another drink of lemonade. He made a face, almost asked for brandy, and remembered. He said, "Maybe the same way you came to these asteroids?" "No, not that. That way went only in one direction, through the fourth dimension, I think. The people of the continent you call Atlantis built that way for our use, though much against our desire; and the machine they made was so fearful that its use sank their whole land into the sea. They were a great, scientific people, and we have not their skill." "Atlantis too," Jerry said. "Now we've heard everything, all but the Little People and Pan." The djinni did not seem to hear him. Its eyes, like dead coals now in the yellow face, rested on Pink. "It was clever of you to recognize us from history." "You go into bottles, speak Arabic, fly and are humanoid in form. I should have guessed your race hours before." "We are not humanoid. You are djinnoid. We came before you in evolution." "How do you know?" asked Daley. "Our legends ... I cannot tell, being no more than six or seven thousand years old myself. But we are told we predate man." "When were you relegated to this belt?" asked Jerry, who was still a little pale. "You were around in Solomon's time." "Yes. He caught and trapped most of my race--we are not so numerous as you cursed rabbits--by the same means you used. One great vat he collected, after some years of the bottles, and sealed up a multitude of my folk and cast them off a ship; somehow the currents dragged the box to Atlantis. There my people were freed, and set about to conquer the land. But the Atlanteans captured them after several decades and, having constructed the terrible machine, sent them off to this forsaken hole in space. The cataclysm the machine made--evidently they hadn't been so clever as they thought, may Allah rot their souls!--set off volcanic action, which eventually sank their country. It was never very large, anyway...."