ZETTA
That midnight of February 10th, Hulda and Dan stood on the small
Porto Rican trail, facing at a brief distance the white girl in the
moonlight. She answered Hulda's call; in a queerly small voice her
words came to them:
"_Zetta! Zetta! Zetta!_"
There was a brief silence. Dan murmured, "Let's go nearer."
Slowly, carefully, they advanced; fearful of again frightening her. But
this time she did not move. She stood watchful, trembling slightly,
but held her ground. And presently they were confronting her. She
was shorter even than Hulda; very slim and frail. A young girl just
reaching maturity. A rose, not yet full-blown. The thought occurred to
Dan. But the comparison was wrong. Not a rose, for this was a flower of
young womanhood of a species no one of earth could name.
She seemed, aside from her snow-white hair, no more than a strangely
beautiful girl of earth. But to both Dan and Hulda came again, more
strongly than before, the feeling of her strangeness. There was
something singularly unusual in her aspect. And this they both recall
clearly; as they stood there for a silent instant confronting her, both
were conscious of sensations indescribable, as though they were feeling
something within themselves--something vague, elusive--something
no mortal of Earth had ever felt before. And, perhaps, hearing
something--so faint, so ethereal they could not define it--faint as
though it were sound heard not by their ears, but by their minds.
And they saw something, too, which perhaps no mortal eyes had ever seen
before. An aura, a dim, very faint red radiance shone around the three
of them as they stood there together in the moonlight. Hulda and Dan
remembered it was something like that.
They stood for a moment, stricken with wonder at their sensations; and
perhaps the strange girl was less timorous as she saw their attitude
of awe. She stared up into Dan's face, and smiled. Queerly wistful;
trusting. A gentle little creature! And he stared down into her dark
eyes and found them shimmering pools of iridescence. Then again she
spoke, other words in a strange, liquid tongue, soft, with curiously
clipped, intoned syllables.
Dan shook his head. "We can't understand you. Can you understand us?"
He smiled; and Hulda smiled.
"She's not afraid of us," said Dan. The girl was waving a hand with
what they knew was a gesture of negation. She could not understand
their language; and when Dan tried Spanish--realizing it was futile;
and tried his imperfect French--her gesture continued.
He tried again. "Dan! Dan! Dan!" he said, and struck his chest. And
Hulda indicated herself with "Hulda! Hulda!"
The girl's eager face brightened. They had established communication;
the first communication between Xenephrene and our earth!
The girl cried, "Zetta, Zetta," and laid her hand on her breast.
It was the first communication between the worlds. What dire events,
tragedies, amazing things to transpire before the last communication
was over!
* * * * *
It is not my purpose, and again, I have no space in which to narrate
all the details of these days. The girl was persuaded to follow Dan
and Hulda, and through all that February she lived with the Cains in
the plantation house, guarded and kept hidden, though the news of her
presence could not be entirely concealed.
The silver ball in the coconut grove was a vehicle in which, by
some method unknown to earth, this girl--this Zetta, as she called
herself--had come from her world, to ours. And she had not come alone.
A man had come with her--he seemed to be of middle age. He lay dead
near the vehicle. Perhaps the victim of an accident; or perhaps the
girl had killed him.
There was no one, as yet, to say. Zetta could not, apparently,
understand any earth language; and her language sounded hopeless to
fathom. She seemed intelligent, docile, willing and anxious to be kept
with the Cains; eager, it seemed at first, to be in the room with
them--to hear them talk. But after that first night, she did not speak
again; and they thought she had fallen into a sullen silence.
There is so much I have to tell! Astronomers at Quito had seen this
silver vehicle enter the earth's atmosphere that night of February
10th; and had seen another, infinitely larger, which they believed had
started from the surface of Xenephrene.
Dan notified father of his strange visitor, of course. Father sent
instructions. The authorities of Porto Rico buried the man's body,
and set a guard to watch constantly over the vehicle as it lay in the
grove. Scientists came to inspect it, and could understand but vaguely
its mechanism.
Two weeks passed. Father was in Miami then; and near the end of
February he started by government plane for Porto Rico.
Conditions all over the world were far worse now. We only had a vague
picture; the radio and television were operating intermittently--but
all the regular channels for the dissemination of news were paralyzed.
And, too, the governments withheld, or distorted to a less terrible
aspect such reports as were available.
Europe was enveloped in snow to the Mediterranean; the Barbary coast
was jammed with refugees. London and Paris, like New York, were
threatened with complete abandonment.
In Canada, they said--like Scandinavia, north Interior Europe and Asia
of the far north--there was less panic, less disaster. These people
were accustomed to intense cold and equipped to withstand it.
In the Canadian rural district, the farmers shut themselves up with
their winter fundamentals of food as had been their custom, and were
said to be making out fairly well. But the big centers of population,
dependent upon transportation and industry, were devastated. Greater
Montreal was abandoned in February.
Transportation everywhere in the United States was kept partially open,
but only by efforts born of the frantic desperation of necessity.
The new Arctic airplanes, recently developed, were being hastily
manufactured in quantity, in government plants established in Florida
and Southern California, and were as hastily put into service to bear
the people southward. The railroads of our northern States kept open
for a while with snow plows loaned by the great Canadian trunk lines
which had long since succumbed.
Steamship service along the Atlantic Coast ventured no farther north
than Charleston, South Carolina. The North Atlantic was filled with
ice floes driven south by the constant storms; the Polar ice field was
reported now as extending nearly down to the former New York-Liverpool
steamship lanes.
The St. Lawrence River was frozen solid, from Montreal past Quebec and
down to its mouth, before Christmas. In January the middle Mississippi
was solid with an ice bridge which one day broke and swept away three
railroad bridges. The Hudson, from Troy to New York harbor, was solid
by mid-February. Within a week after that even the Savannah River
became impassable, and the port closed.
Yet, for all that, by whatever desperate expedient possible, the
people were being transported south, and were cared for in their new
locations, in the best fashion that could be managed.
* * * * *
What formerly had been our tropic zone was thronged with new arrivals.
Daily they poured in from the north. And from the far south, as
well--in spite of government's pleadings and commands to the contrary;
from Buenos Aires, Rio, Santiago, people were striving to get north,
nearer the equator, fearful of this new heat and blazing daylight which
was coming upon them.
Nor was it only a disturbance of the world's normal temperatures. With
the abnormal climate came other inevitable disturbances. From widely
divergent localities, devastating windstorms were reported. A typhoon,
wholly out of season, swept the China Sea. A hurricane in Central
America. From Peru and Chile they told of heavy rains flooding the arid
coast. Rain fell at Biskra with torrential rainstorms sweeping up and
across the Sahara.
I had been saying that father, near the end of February, went to
Porto Rico. The two weeks previous to his arrival there were weeks of
amazement growing daily into awe as Dan and Hulda were brought into
closer contact with their beautiful, unearthly visitor.
It came upon them gradually, the strangeness, weirdness of this girl
so like themselves at first glance, yet obviously a being wholly
different. They treated her as a visiting guest, though in reality
she was a captive. Upon father's advice--for he guessed, at least
partially, what the outcome was to be--the Cains were content to do
nothing with Zetta save to have her live with them in seclusion; and to
make her comfortable.
That she was extremely intelligent, Dan saw at once. She evidently
realized that they were wholly friendly. Whatever her purpose, living
there with them seemed all she desired.
She had her own room, next to Hulda's. She seemed to appreciate Hulda's
efforts for her comfort. She ate with the family, making whimsical
faces at the food which she obviously disliked at first. For the rest,
she seemed content to sit in the living room, watching them, listening
to them talk.
To Dan, her constant presence was at once fascinating and disturbing.
Fascinating, for Zetta's beauty was queerly magnetic, but disturbing,
too, for there was about this girl always that uncanniness indefinable.
For hours she would sit in the living room, apart from the family
group. She did not like the chairs, preferring to sit crosslegged on
the floor, on a cushion. She was very silent, although she would answer
when spoken to, with a smile or a strange, friendly gesture, and with
her eyes following each person who spoke.
Her complexion was the creamy, pink white which we of earth call
beauty. She blushed, or flushed, readily. For no apparent reason a
wave of rose color would suffuse her face, throat and neck. It even
extended sometimes to her arms, and to her legs as they showed amid
her half-revealing drapery--the smooth white of her skin flushing with
deep rose color. For no reason; and then Dan noticed that it generally
happened when the outer door was opened and a rush of cold air swept
in. Nature automatically protecting against the cold!
Dan often would furtively watch her. He was sitting in a far corner of
the room one evening; the elder Cains and Hulda were gathered about the
radio.
The small, clear voice of the announcer was giving a summary of the
world's tragic news, this middle of February; on the small television
screen which the Miami Central Office was connecting with various
localities to illustrate his words, vague, fleeting pictures were
mirrored.
Zetta was seated on the floor, in an opposite corner from Dan. He saw
that she was not listening to the radio. But she was listening to
something! Her head was tilted alert; across her face a succession of
her emotions was mirrored--a frown; whimsical pleasure; a smile.
She was listening; and Dan realized suddenly that she was hearing
things he could not hear! A world of things, perhaps; something
displeased her, she gestured disapprovingly; and then smiled again.
Uncanny! She was wholly absorbed, unaware that Dan was watching.
Hearing things no mortal of earth could hear! Like a dog, Dan thought,
which hears faint sounds denied its master. But Dan knew it was more
than that.
And then his heart leaped. Zetta was seeing something he could not see!
Something in the room. Her eyes followed it, as evidently it moved. She
turned her head to gaze after it; she smiled, with breathless parted
lips, then laughed.
Was she, perhaps, irrational? Conjuring visions in an unbalanced mind?
The explanation occurred to Dan, but he did not believe it was so.
Rather, it seemed to him, this girl's perceptions were more acute than
ours.
She saw and heard things beyond the range of our human senses. Here on
earth they were things strange to her. She was listening and watching
them; surprised, often pleased, as one with normal senses gazes upon
new sights and finds them interesting.
Dan found opportunity to regard the girl more closely. Her eyes, when
she looked at him, seemed normal. But at other times he saw that her
pupils became suddenly abnormally large; or again, contracted to
pin points, even in the dimness of indoors. At once, a dark veil--a
film--seemed to creep over the eyeball; but she became aware of the
scrutiny, and it was gone before Dan could make sure.
Her ears, in outward shape a trifle rounder than ours, were generally
hidden--pink shells in the waving mass of her white hair. Dan fancied
that they moved at her will--that sometimes they expanded.
Her fingers, and her toes, were long, slim and tapering, with
pink-white, pointed nails. The joints were more numerous than with us;
it gave them a prehensile aspect; and Dan fancied, too, that the arch
of the bottom of her foot was cup-shaped as though it might serve as a
vacuum for walking upon inclined surfaces.
Father had told Dan that Zetta probably was from Xenephrene. But no
one could be sure. An idea occurred to Dan, and a few days later, just
before dawn, he and Hulda tried it. Xenephrene, on clear days, was
visible just before sunrise. The weather, here in Porto Rico now, was
generally below freezing. Once it had snowed. The Cains' fruit groves
were killed; but with all the world's catastrophe for comparison, Dan
and his father thought little of it. The Porto Rican day now was but
two hours long. The sun made a low arc in the south, descending within
two hours, not very much to the west of where it had risen.
* * * * *
It was mid morning when in the darkness before dawn, Hulda and Dan with
Zetta stood outside the plantation house. To the south Xenephrene would
soon rise.
"Do you think she'll recognize it?" Hulda asked.
Dan smiled; how could one guess? Zetta stood between them, puzzled,
looking first at one, then the other. She had walked out with them
quietly. She always walked quietly, carefully, as though trying to
imitate their own slow steps. And though Dan, with gestures, had often
tried to make her leap into the air, she never would.
It was cold, this mid morning before dawn; Dan and Hulda were dressed
in heavy, northern garments. Zetta wore the filmy robe in which they
had first seen her. She seemed to prefer her own garments, a number of
which had been brought from the vehicle, and installed with her at the
Cains'. To the cold she was utterly oblivious; the cold of outdoors, or
the warmth inside--she seemed not aware of the difference.
They stood on the knoll. The sky to the southward was brightening.
The stars there moved in a low arc. Then Xenephrene came up. Blazing,
purple-white star.
"Look!" said Dan. "Zetta, look! We call that Xenephrene. Can't you
understand me? Do you recognize that star? Your world? Did you come
from there?"
At sight of the great purple star, a queer emotion swept her face. Dan
pleaded: "Zetta, haven't you learned anything of our language? We call
that Xenephrene. Your world? You came from there? Speak, Zetta!"
She said slowly in English, with an accent quaint and indescribable:
"Yes. My worl'--I came from there."
* * * * *
"But what's the matter with you, Hulda?"
"Nothing."
"But there is!"
"Not at all, Dan. Why do you say that?"
"But there is! You're angry, or hurt. At me? What have I done?"
"Nonsense. You haven't done--" She stopped; and he saw that her eyes
were filled with sudden tears; she tried to protest, but the words
would not come.
They were sitting alone late one evening in the Cains' living room. Dan
had noticed that for some days Hulda was abnormally quiet, and she no
longer treated him with her usual comradeship. A reserve had come to
her. And now, when he asked her why, she burst into tears!
She sobbed openly; he tried to put his arm around her, but she pushed
him away.
"Hulda!" A light broke on Dan. "It's Zetta--why, you silly little
girl--"
"You were--were kissing her this morning!"
"I was _not_! Nonsense!"
"Well, I s-saw you, with her in your arms, l-lifting her up--"
"Yes. Lifting her up. But not kissing her. But I'm kissing _you_!
Now--like that! And _that_--Hulda, darling--"
It is not my part to reconstruct the scene that followed between them,
although both have described the wonder of it all to all of the family
who would listen--wonder and awe at the voicing of love which all of
us knew they had felt for a year or two. They were engaged when ten
minutes later they thumped on the elder Cains' door to tell them the
wonderful news.
Dan maintained that to Zetta he owed a great debt of gratitude; for
without Hulda's jealousy of Zetta, Dan says he might have been too
stupid ever to propose. The episode with Zetta was simple enough; Dan
explained it readily to Hulda's entire satisfaction.
He had been alone with Zetta that morning, trying to make her talk more
of our language, which now he knew that she was learning. With a mind
wholly different from ours--this Dan now realized--she undoubtedly was
learning with extraordinary rapidity. But, quite evidently, she had her
own method. She would not speak again; but when he began naming objects
in the room, trying to aid her by systematic teaching, she showed
approval and listened attentively.
During the course of this lesson, Dan had touched her. He laid his hand
on her arm. Curious sensation! He felt at once, not a lack of solidity,
but a seeming lack of weight. She had risen to her feet as though
startled by his touch. He stood, from his much greater height looking
down at her. Still holding her arm.
And this Dan confessed to me, but most assuredly he did not confess it
to Hulda. As he stood here, staring into the glowing dark depths of
Zetta's eyes, it occurred to him that he should release her. But he
did not. Instead, he caught her in his arms. Lifted her up. Not, to be
wholly truthful, because scientifically he wanted to test her weight.
Rather was it because, at touching her, an instant of madness swept him.
It passed. She was pushing him away, smiling, startled, but unafraid.
And, with the madness gone, he tossed her into the air as one would
toss a child. Caught her; tossed her again to the ceiling and let her
fall, to land lightly on tiptoe as her feet came down to the straw
matting of the floor. And in the doorway, he became aware that Hulda
was standing, silently watching them.
When father arrived at the Cains' he weighed Zetta. Had she been a
normal girl of earth, by her appearance she would have weighed some
ninety or a hundred pounds. Zetta weighed eighteen pounds!
There were several scientists in Porto Rico who, at father's
invitation, came to see Zetta. They were with her hours each day. Dan
and Hulda were excluded. Father's manner, Dan said, was very solemn,
and he seemed to be laboring under a suppressed excitement. Then came
the news of March 2, that invaders from Xenephrene had landed on the
earth near New York. The scientists at the Cains' house hastened to San
Juan, but father remained.
One afternoon--it was the afternoon of March 4--Hulda and Dan listened
at the door when father was with Zetta. She was talking to him now!
Talking in low, slow tones; haltingly, and often he would question and
prompt her. Abruptly he rose to his feet and came out.
"Hulda! Dan, where are your father and mother?"
Dan called them; they came hustling in. The excitement of these days
was too much for the elder Cains; they lived in a constant confusion
and bewilderment.
"Sit down, all of you," father commanded. "Zetta--come out here, child."
She came at his call, wide-eyed, gentle; but she, too, was trembling
with excitement. Father seated her gently on a cushion. He said:
"Our earth lashed into turmoil by this extraordinary change of climate,
is far worse off than that. These invaders--well, what Zetta has to say
will at least give us information--aid us in doing what we can to repel
them! It is a bad condition--it may prove serious--possibly complete
disaster!"
He regarded Zetta with a gentle tenderness. "This girl has come from
her world to help us. Yes, she has learned our language, with what
strange qualities of mind, and senses so different from ours you will
be amazed to hear. A very gentle little creature. I think all of you
have grown to love her--she says you have been very kind to her, and
she loves you very much, particularly Hulda."
It struck Hulda with a guilty pang, hearing this after her own jealousy
of Zetta; for Hulda was no more than human, and there had been days
when secretly she hotly resented the strange and beautiful girl's
presence in the house with Dan. But that was over. Hulda exclaimed
impulsively, "I do love her!"
The two girls' glances met affectionately. "Yes," Zetta said suddenly.
"We do love ver' much."
Father went on: "She is here--came here to help us. All this time, in
her own way, she has been striving to learn our language that she might
tell us. She has told me everything. Zetta, tell them--just what you
told me--"
Father stopped his nervous pacing and sat down abruptly. And without
preface, quietly, sometimes haltingly, in her strangely small voice and
curiously clipped syllables, Zetta began her amazing narrative.