The birds that Smith and he had seen had not been birds at all, but
aircraft built in imitation of them.

For this new arrival had been made in almost perfect imitation of a bee!
It was very close to an exact reproduction. For one exception, it did
not have the hairy appearance so characteristic of bees; the body and
"legs" were smooth, and shiny. (Later, Van Emmon saw machines which went
so far as even to imitate the hairs.) Also, instead of trying to
duplicate the two compound eyes which are found, one on each side of a
bee's head, a perfectly round representation of a single eye was built,
like a conning tower, toward the front of the bow. Presumably, the
observer sat or stood within this "head."

But otherwise it was wonderfully like a drone bee. Van Emmon was
strongly reminded of what he had once viewed under a powerful lens. The
fragile semitransparent wings, the misshapen legs, and even the jointed
body with its scale-like segments, all were carefully duplicated on a
large scale. Imagine a bee thirty feet long!

At first the geologist was puzzled to find that it carried a pair of
many-jointed antennae. He could not see how any intelligent being would
make use of them; they were continually waving about, much as bees wave
theirs. Evidently these were the loose objects he had already noted.
"Now," he wondered, "why in thunder did the builders go to so much
trouble for the sake of mere realism?"

Then he saw that the antennae served a very real purpose. There was no
doubt about it; they were wireless antennae!

For presently the newcomer, who so far had not shown himself at any