I find myself now somewhat at a loss accurately and yet succinctly to
depict that next hour or two. You who read this of course have heard
much of the strange affair from newscasters and from the public prints.
Garbled reports, some of them. Others pedantic with technical details
of science. I am no scientist. It is my purpose here merely to give
a factual account of the weird incidents which brought to me, Kent
Fanning, a person certainly of no importance save perhaps to myself, a
sudden prominence not in one world, but in two.
Queer that throughout my lifetime there had always been talk that
some day, here on Earth, scientists would discover the secret of
spaceflight; that then intrepid adventurers would journey out into
space. But as you all know now, the reverse, so seldom anticipated, was
true. Another world came to us, in the person of this strange Venus
girl; came indeed by utter chance, or destiny if you will; to me.
Venus; the Earth. Of all known planets, the two most close, and most
alike. There are things brewing in the Universe of which none of us can
be aware, of course. A myriad things. And here was one of them. Unknown
to us, Venus and the Earth already were intermingled, fused into the
beautiful little person of this strange girl--the blood of Venus, the
blood of Earth flowing in her veins.
You had not heard of George Peters, doubtless. Nor had I! A research
chemist and physicist, in New York City, about 1930. He was a young
man then; I think, twenty-eight. He sought no publicity. A wealthy
man. With some twenty companions, all of them scientists, some of them
older than himself, he was working, not on the secret of spaceflight,
but with a ray--a vibration--which he hoped might reach some distant
planet, as a means of communication if there should be inhabitants
there.
Ironically he did not know he had succeeded! And it was men from
Venus--the villainous Tollgamo of whom now you have heard so much--who
was attracted by his signals and came to him; abducting him and his
companions so that all that was known, here on earth was that one
morning George Peters' laboratory was found wrecked, and he and his
companions were gone.
"George Peters, that is my father," the girl was telling me now as I
headed the small open boat for the island where young Allen and I were
camping.
And she had come to Earth--the first time in her sixteen years that
she had been off Venus; stolen a small spaceflight cylinder from her
father. Her Venus people needed help from the threat of Tollgamo. All
that was good and beautiful on Venus and in her Arone world of love and
music and beauty, was to be destroyed by the monstrous threat of this
Dictator from his mechanized realm of the Gorts.
"Wait," I said, as she poured it at me, at times only half coherent.
"You came here to Earth, for help? You came alone?"
"Yes. You have not, father thinks, yet discovered the secret of
spaceflight. He was sending the cylinder, with drawings and scientific
details of how spaceflight was accomplished by Tollgamo and his evil
men. And so I came. We want that you should build a spaceship and come
to Venus. Your men, and some of your weapons of war, to help us fight
Tollgamo."
And she had dropped here into the Gulf of Mexico, wrecked the little
one-man space-vehicle so that she barely escaped with her life. And it
sank, with its secret of spaceflight obliterated by the sea, even if by
some chance the little metal mechanisms themselves could be recovered.
I think that she had given no thought to that realization as she swam
to save herself and suddenly found my trolling hooks entangled in her
hair. Nereid of the sea. Far more like her Venus mother than her Earth
father, water was almost her natural element, since her blood did not
need the replenishment of oxygen so quickly as ours, so that for ten
minutes or more she need not breathe.
* * * * *
I learned only fragmentary details of all this that Midge Peters had
to tell, there in the boat as we headed for the island. Surely I must
admit that the weirdness of it startled me, and for just a moment
perhaps, it vaguely occurred to me that here was some trickster, or a
mentality unbalanced. But to look at her, was to know that certainly
here was no Earth girl!
I had to believe her. But I must admit, I gave little thought, there in
the boat, to any menace to her world, or to the ironic fact that she
had brought to Earth the treasured secret of spaceflight and already
had lost it so that she was marooned here. Here was the amazing,
beautiful little creature herself in the boat beside me, and what she
was saying of Venus dwindled into insignificance with the stirring
of my pulses as I stared at her. Slim little body, hardly matured,
but fashioned with almost a normal earthly beauty. Yet there was a
strangeness that made her different. The flush of pink coral to her
flesh; her shimmering robe with moonbeams rippling on it like moonrays
on green rippled water; her long tawny tresses, drying now in the wind.
But most of all, I think, the strangeness was in her eyes. The sea was
there in the green depths of her eyes. Eyes that mirrored the soul of a
strange girlhood; eyes that had seen things strange to me, reflecting
now the thoughts, emotions of another world.
"You look at me so queerly," she said suddenly. "Why is that?"
"Well you--you--" Suddenly it was hard to say anything of my
conflicting thoughts. "You--well, why wouldn't I be startled? A little
sea nymph. You should have been named Nereid."
Again her laugh rippled.
"Nereid? Why yes, my father calls me that, though my mother named me
Midge. That was when she learned English. So I am not like Earth-girls?
My father has said it many times. But you--"
Her gaze at me was earnest, direct. "You do not look queer to me," she
added. "You look much in the fashion of my father, grown younger."
Surely I have given only a vague picture indeed of that half hour in
the boat with Nereid as the puttering little outboard motor drove us
to the island where Jack Allen would be waiting for me. Half an hour,
so crowded with my first jumbled impressions of what Nereid's weird
Venus-world must be like.
"That is your island?" Nereid said suddenly. "Why--it looks very
pretty."
The storm still was rising in the south--occasional bursts of lightning
and rolling, reverberating thunderclaps. But the starlight and
moonlight was over us. It silvered the island palms; it lay like white
metal on the sand of the island's shore.
I headed us into the little cove. A small dilapidated dock was there.
On a little rise behind the palmetto fringe, under the palm trees, a
shaft of moonlight gleamed on the white of our tent. I thought that
young Allen would have heard the putt-putt of my motor and be down at
the dock now to greet me. But there was no sign of him.