Docile, decadent Venus was easy
pickings for that twenty-first century
Hitler's dream of cosmic empire.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1942.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
My name is Arthur Frane. You who read this story now, of course
are familiar with momentous events into which I was unexpectedly
plunged--momentous for all mankind.
I write this narrative now to add the true details to what you have
all read and heard blared by the newscasters around the world. I have
been extolled as a hero although I did nothing except try to keep from
getting killed.
I was twenty-six years old last summer, in June of 2003, when fate
so strangely brought Venta and me together. My family is wealthy, as
you have heard. Do not envy me for that. An income of ten thousand
decimars, however nice it may seem in theory, is in reality no
advantage to a young man of twenty-six. I am a big blond fellow whom
the newscasters have been pleased to call Viking-like and handsome as a
god. I'm much obliged. But whatever truth there is in it, that too has
been a disadvantage.
The weird events began in July, last summer, when with Jim Gregg I
went hunting in that Adirondac forest. Jim and I were in Government
College together. I left to spend my income and become a dawdler--the
disadvantage of money; and Jim joined the Crime Prevention Bureau of
the New York Shadow Squad. We got a one-day hunting permit. Jim took
his official crime-tracker equipment, with an extra flash-gun for me;
we flew to the Adirondac mountain slope which our permit named and
hopefully set out on foot to try our luck.
But we had no luck. A few birds, which even the minimum pencil-ray
flash had all but burned to a crisp, were all we had bagged. Evening
came, with twilight settling so that the forest glades were deepening
into purple. And then suddenly it seemed that we heard a rustling in
the underbrush--a rustling which ought to be a deer.
We crouched in a thicket, waiting. The sound stopped. "Let's try the
listener," I whispered.
Jim got out his little eavesdropping gadget. But he had no time to
connect it. The rustling began again. It was obviously up a short slope
no more than a hundred feet from us--some wild animal which seemed now
to be retreating.
"I'll take a chance," I muttered. "If that's a deer, we'll lose it if I
can't drill it now."
We knew it could not be a human, since our permit for today barred
anyone else from the twenty square miles of Government preserve
allotted to us. I fired at the sound, with my violet pencil-flash
eating through the underbrush at the top of the slope.
There was a startled, weird outcry; and from the summit of the little
rise a shape broke cover. A girl! She came bursting from a thicket no
more than three feet to the side of the swath my flash had burned, and
for a second or two she stood poised on a rock with the open evening
sky a background above and behind her. A slim shape of bare legs and
arms with a brief drape from shoulders to her thighs. The starlight and
fading daylight gleamed on her bronzed skin as though she were a metal
statue.
"Well--I say--" Jim muttered.
* * * * *
Thoughts are instant things. There was in my mind the vague idea that
here, by some wild circumstances, was a girl in a fancy-dress party
costume or something of the kind. But the thought, and Jim's muttered
words of astonishment, were in another second stricken away. She paused
for that instant on the rock, and then she leaped. Amazing, incredible
leap! It carried her in a flat arc some ten or fifteen feet above the
ground and twenty feet away, where light as a faun she landed on the
toes of her bare feet. Nearer to us now; and seeing us, perhaps for the
first time, she stood and stared.
I could see the silvery streaks running through the black hair that
framed her face. It was a queerly beautiful face, apparently devoid of
normal cosmetic-make-up. Negroid? Oriental? In that second I had the
thought that it was neither--nor anything else that I could name. A
girl with a mysterious wild beauty which stirred my pulses.
"Well--good Lord--" Jim muttered again. He too was staring, with a
hand in his shock of bristling red hair, and I can imagine the look of
numbed astonishment on his freckled, pug-nosed face. "Good Lord, how
did she jump like that?"