"Having benefitted by some knowledge of modern technology on the part of their original ancestors, this race soon attained a degree of civilization equivalent to our own, though with fewer numbers. Their science enabled them to detect the unbalanced nature of the ionosphere, so they knew they had to get off the planet in order to survive. By some means unknown to us, they were able to make observations through the ionosphere and detect livable conditions on Venus, after all. In other words, after a billion years beyond our time, Venus must have had sufficient time to build up an atmosphere containing a life-sustaining percentage of oxygen. This discovery spurred the building of their space ark, which was to take a representative number of their kind to the new world.
"Now in the meantime let's go back to the second group that was lost--Emily, the WAACs and the Texans. They, too, went through the time machine and built up a civilization contemporaneous with that of New Bretania. Hence the origin of the country, Texania. These latter people were trying to get the ark of space from the New Bretanians.
"Don't you see how it all fits in? When those two groups went through the time machine, we found ourselves in an alternate time, a world changed by their effects on two or three thousand years of the immediate past."
"Then how did everything get back to where it was originally?" asked Uncle Andy. "What got rid of that alternate time so abruptly?"
"The alien," Henry replied. "I think we arrived here, in the first place, by accident and without his knowledge. As a time-traveler, he was no doubt gone from this world for long stretches of time. Perhaps a gap of several thousands of years means nothing to him. But somewhere along that alternate time he returned. He probably proceeded at once to trace down the sources of New Bretania and Texania. This could have led him not only back to Lady Dewitt and the Texans but forward, again, to this present time, to the moment when they were about to go into the time machine in the first place. Taking them prisoner thus prevented that alternate time from occurring. So it was all a lost interlude and Weston went right on talking at the meeting as though nothing had happened. Yet all the while the alien was now aware of our presence, and so he came to take us into custody."