"I do not know that I can explain it to you. I perceive your knowledge of the nature of light is elementary.... But the material with which we surrounded the space-ship in which we came, in order to protect it from the radiation of suns unknown to you, has a powerful action on all animal substances. It is a material not unlike your radium, but a thousand times more powerful. When we reached your planet, your atmosphere carried it to every part of the earth, and all living things received it. Those who were most affected by it were turned to metal which retained that quality called 'life' within its interior reaches; the others became merely solid metal.
"Our birds are under instructions to bring us all such individuals as possess life. In our laboratories we make their forms over, so they will be useful to us as servants. Those who have become solid, of course, nothing can be done for. We have found in the past that when we take a new planet and make the individuals over into machines, unless we return them to familiar surroundings, they lose their brains when they reawake. Therefore you woke in the same place in which you passed from consciousness."
"Wonderful," said Sherman, "and where do you come from and how did you get here?"
He felt the Lassan's amusement. "That is two questions you have asked, and not one. Nevertheless I will answer. We come from a planet of another star, very far away—I do not know how to express it to you. Your methods of measurement for these things are different from ours." In Sherman's mind appeared a picture of the night heavens with the tremendous ribbon of the Milky Way swinging across its center; his attention was directed to one star, a very bright one.
"Rigel!" his mind called, and the thought went on. He was suddenly transported to the neighborhood of the star, felt that it was ages ago, long before the earth had cooled, and saw that the star, then a sun like our own, was threatened by some enormous catastrophe, a titanic explosion. Abruptly the picture was wiped out and he beheld the comet, the great comet the earthly astronomers had watched for so long before it struck on that fateful night, and realized that it was no comet, but an interplanetary vehicle bound from the planet of Rigel to the earth.
The star, like our own sun, was threatened by some enormous catastrophe, a titanic explosion.
"But how—?" he began to frame another question. The Lassan cut across it firmly. "It is my turn to seek information now. We are interested in the machine that brought you here—the bird machine. How does it operate?"