In the bewildering hours that followed, the Vator companions learned the answers to some of their enigmatic experiences. But they learned also of strange and horrible things which even the more advanced of the queer colony did not understand. III Among their new acquaintances was a stocky, pop-eyed physicist with a fringe of hair like stiff iron wire, who introduced himself as Gordo Lanson. In the year 2076 he had been experimenting with a new super-cyclotron and inadvertently had been caught in the almost inconceivably strong magnetic field used for the acceleration of electrons in the vast atom smasher. He had felt a moment of intense vertigo, a wrenching, dimensional sort of straining of every cell, then he, like the Vator passengers, had found himself suspended in the huge net. There were also a dozen orientals, some from Hiroshima and some from Nagasaki. They had been here since the days of the atomic blasts. Then there was a thin, dark-skinned chap with strange eyes. He had been flashing through space on an exploratory trip to Jupiter, when suddenly his ship had spun into an etheric vortex, one of those enigmatic whirlpools of magnetic flux which were so deadly to space travel. He, Dar Mikol, had been torn from 3122, the year of the great space war between Earth-colonized Mars and its parent planet. There was a Russian peasant who had been plowing his field in 1688 when a lightning bolt split the lowering skies and threw him through time and space to land in the Kralons' net. There were also fifteen other people from Randall's own time; the missing Vator passengers of prior trips. There were a hundred or so more humans in the strange colony, and all had been drawn to this strange primeval world through some esoteric passage induced by the Kralons' Time Trap. "But what is the reason behind it?" Randall asked Zor Ala in bafflement. "Why do they want us? What do they do with us?" Before Zor Ala had a chance to reply, a loud click sounded from a small diaphragm on the wall, then a harsh voice rasped out a dozen words in crudely accented English. Randall didn't catch the meaning. He turned questioningly to Zor Ala. The future man sighed. "The Kralons want to interview the new arrivals," he said. "You are to wait at the West gate in the stockade." "And if we don't?" Randall asked. "I would," Zor Ala said soberly. Randall shrugged and led his companions across the field. Jerome Jackson was shaking even more violently than the four school ma'ams. The fat little salesman's plump cheeks quivered, and his pale eyes rolled in their sockets. "Wha--what are they going to do with us now?" he quavered. Randall examined the man pityingly. "Apparently nothing very serious," he said. "Because our new companions over there are still very much alive."