Zani went on with her drawing. Gail said:
"It isn't fantasy, then. Look at this. It's a—maybe you'll call it a car. Only it looks like a sled. Or maybe a motorcycle."
She showed him a finished sketch. With a childish directness, yet a singular effect of direct observation, Zani had drawn a vehicle. It did not have wheels. It rested on what looked like two short, thick runners like skids.
"This isn't fantasy, either," said Soames. "There've been wheelless vehicles built lately. They're held an inch or so above the ground by columns of air pouring out. They ride on cushions of air. But they have to have perfect highways. It isn't likely that a child would draw them if she hadn't seen them."
In silence, Gail showed other sketches. A man and woman in costumes somehow related to those the children had worn at the beginning. There was a picture of a group of people.
"Odd," said Soames. "Everybody wears a belt like the children have on now. Everybody. As if it were official."
He glanced at Zani. She wore a belt over American-style young-girl's clothing today. The belt was neither leather nor plastic nor anything that could have a name put to it. It had two round and two square medallions placed two on each side of the fastening, which was not a buckle. The others wore the same. Soames puzzled over it for a moment.
Gail offered him another sheet of paper.
"I'm going to tear this up when you've seen it."
It was a landscape, sketched in with surprisingly bold strokes of the soft pencil. The time was night. Near the bottom of the picture there was a city of the strange, catenary-curve architecture. It was drawn so small, though, that most of the picture was black sky. But there was a blazing light upon the city, and it came from something monstrous and jagged and incandescent and vast, plunging upon the city from the sky, trailing flames behind it.
"And this," said Gail, very quietly.
It was a picture of a crater, a ring-mountain, the scene of the impact of something terrible and huge. It was a chasm with circular, broken rocky walls. There was a fallen tree in the foreground, near the spot from which the sketch seemed to have been made.
"You're right not to show anyone else those drawings," said Soames. "The kids are in a bad enough fix as visitors of a superior race. If it should be realized that they're not here by accident, but somehow to open a way for invasion by the population of a whole planet, well, you can just imagine ..."
Zani giggled suddenly, and he jumped. But her eyes were on the paper before her. Soames glanced out the window. Mal had toppled over, and one of the puppies had climbed valiantly on her back and was pulling with all his tiny might at a puppy-mouthful of her hair. His tail wagged vigorously the while. Hod laughed, and Mal giggled, and inside the cottage Zani—who could not see what had happened—giggled with them.
"She couldn't see it, but she knew what happened," said Soames. "I suspect this place is so top-secret that it's a breach of security to remember it outside. If anybody notices that little trick the kids can do, they'll be suspected of casually inspecting high-secrecy stuff while drawing pictures or playing with little dogs."
Soames returned to his quarters. He set to work upon the highly necessary task of pretending that he was a castaway from the children's civilization in order to improvise conveniences that as a castaway he'd consider crude, but as an aborigine amazing.
From time to time, though, he wondered sardonically about the public-relations program on the children. He'd prepared a complete report about the ship, telling in detail about its arrival and adding everything he could infer about the civilization that had made it, except its location on the Earth of aeons ago and its imminent doom. Gail had written what she considered the best human-interest story of her life about the children. Neither report was asked for. Nobody knew where either was to be sent. Soames guessed sardonically at a change of policy somewhere.
But the problem justified worry, the simple, relatively insignificant problem of the children here and now, with all thought of flaming skies and upheaved earth put firmly aside.
The children had to be revealed. But the world would automatically assume that the crew of an alien spaceship must be in some fashion monsters. But four nicely raised children? Space-travellers? Spaceships navigated by boys and girls who liked to play with puppies? Such innocuous persons to represent the most deadly danger the modern world had faced?
But they did represent it. There was no way out of the fact. And somehow the facts had to be put across. The public-relations counsellors who had interviewed the children pointed out the means. They got the job.
The advance publicity was thoroughly professional. The spaceship's company was to be revealed in the most stupendous broadcast of all time. For the second time in history, a trans-Atlantic relay patrol would form two relay-channels from North America to Europe. It would reach Japan via the Aleutians and a relay-ship, by wire from Japan to all Asia and—again relayed—to Australia. South Africa would get the coverage by land-wire down the continent from the Pillars of Hercules. The Mediterranean basin, the Near East, Scandinavia, and even Iceland would see the spectacle. Detailed instructions were given to Gail to give to the children.
The very top feminine TV personality of America would serve as hostess, substituting for Gail, who must try to make the children understand. Miss Linda Beach could establish a personal contact with any audience. One had only to watch her to respond to her charm, her wholesomeness, her adroit sincerity. She had sold soap, automobiles, vitamin tablets and dessicated soup. Obviously, she was the perfect saleswoman for the children out of space.
"I hope the professionals know what they're doing," Soames had said to Gail. "I'm a simple soul who'd be inclined to tell the truth without trimmings. It might not be easy, and it might not be comfortable, but it would be fact."
A small fast transport came to get the children and Gail and Soames. It took off.
Soames took a seat beside Fran. He took out a pencil and a pad of paper. He drew a sketch of a boy flying a kite, and added a close-up drawing of the kite. He drew a boy walking on stilts, and a drawing of how stilts were made. Soames hadn't actually seen a boy walking on stilts for years, and it might now be a lost art, but Fran showed interest. Soames drew a bicycle with a boy on it, and then modified the bike into a motorcycle. He hoped his sketches would strike Fran as interesting, if primitive, things a boy might do for his own satisfaction.
Fran was intrigued. Presently he took the pencil and made sketches of his own. A boy with a belt like his rode something which vaguely resembled a sledge or a motorcycle. He made a detailed drawing of a runner. This was an air-sled, such as Zani had pictured in more elaborate form. Fran sketched the air-column generator, and it was utterly simple and a boy of fourteen could make it. After painful scrutiny Soames realized that it was a ram-jet engine which would start itself and operate in still air. In the modern world, it would make gas-turbine engines practical for locomotives and motorcars.
The transport landed. A motorcycle escort surrounded the car with drawn curtains which carried the children from Idlewild into New York. In time the car dived down into the freight entrance of the new Communications Building on 59th Street. Secret Service men had cleared all corridors so the children reached their dressing-rooms unseen.
Linda Beach appeared an hour later and began the rehearsal.
The children gathered the purpose of the thing by watching the monitors. They chattered together, and the girls went pleasantly through what was expected of them. Hod seemed quite numb, and Fran scowled. But he was more gracious when he saw Soames going through similar antics.