"
"What do you mean, Lenox?" she said. "They wouldn't try to do us any
harm, would they? Why should they?"
"I don't say they would," he replied; "but still you never know. You
see, their ideas of right and wrong and hospitality and all that sort of
thing may be quite different to what we have on the earth. In fact, they
may not be men at all, but just a sort of monster with perhaps a
superhuman intellect with all sorts of extra-human ideas in it.
"Then there's another thing," he went on. "Suppose they fancied a trip
through Space, and thought that they had as good a right to the
_Astronef_ as we have? I daresay they've seen us by this time if they've
got telescopes, as no doubt they have, perhaps a good deal more powerful
than ours, and they may be getting ready to receive us now. I think I'll
get the guns in place before we go down, in case their moral ideas, as
dear old Hans Breitmann called them, are not quite the same as ours."
CHAPTER X
The words were hardly out of his mouth before Zaidie, who still had her
glasses to her eyes, and was looking down towards the great city whose
glazed roofs were flashing with a thousand tints in the pale crimson
sunlight, said with a little tremor in her voice:
"Look, Lenox, down there--don't you see something coming up? That little
black thing. Just look how fast it's coming up; it's quite distinct
already.
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